


The Stars

by Fried_Ren



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Guardian Angel, Smut, Soulmate AU, angel au, ending is quite the zinger, historic AU, kpop, nct - Freeform, sicheng - Freeform, this is my first post so be gentle please lol, winwin - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-18
Updated: 2019-03-18
Packaged: 2019-11-24 02:40:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18160397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fried_Ren/pseuds/Fried_Ren
Summary: If there was anything in the world that you lacked, it was adventure; a journey that you would tell people for years to come.Setting foot outside your tiny town had never been so daunting, especially in the presence of a stern mouthed stranger you had only met the night before. It didn't take you long to realise that the world that you thought you knew was, in reality, much different - this realisation came in the form of a devastatingly beautiful man that you swore had fallen from the very heavens. The more you became wrapped up in him, the more you would learn about the place you once called home, and the people that lived alongside you.You would come to learn that such knowledge came with a heavy price.





	The Stars

Sometimes, when the time of the year was right and it was the correct hour in the evening, the sun would rest between the twin peaks of the mountain range your village lay under as if they were only there to hold the sun up in all its fading majesty. Your village and all the land surrounding it was dusted in the most glorious golden light, erasing all signs of difficulty and struggle, and caressing all with the final tendrils of warmth before the mountains encased the sun, and it was hidden from view until the morn broke.   
The land you were treading, however, did not get this honour, and dusk soon arrived without the familiar sight of liquid splendour bathing everything in light. You missed the burning presence of the star so far in the sky, but you knew that you would see it again soon enough.

When you were little and the sun would shine and your mother was lighthearted enough to let you play in the meadows, your father would read fairy tales to you and your brother about an ancient race that lived hundreds of years ago, before man could remember. He told you that they were beautiful, and smart, and fiercely loyal to their own, and you can remember the wonder on your brother’s face as you both learned about the rise and fall of a race you could hardly fathom. You saw the pictures, the crudely drawn ink sketches of the beings, and you were instantly enthralled by them; by their tall stature, their long and lithe figures, and of course the wings that protruded from their backs.  
They were impossibly large, with wingspans doubling the height of their bodies fully extended. A gorgeous plumage of pure white that you had only seen of the regal swans that sometimes drifted down the river and you would entice towards you with seeds and dried fruit.

You were hooked on them, eager to find out more from your father who seemed to know everything - only to be told that they didn’t exist any longer. They had been killed off, slaughtered for the pretty price their wings would gather from kings and queens of distant lands, and your young heart was thoroughly broken. How could such magical creatures just disappear like that? How could we humans do such a thing to gentle beings?

You had lived for just over a decade longer when dark tidings came from the East, poorly hushes whispers about creatures unlike any other spotted in the deepest woods; the woods so far away it became uncharted territory. They said that the beings were brutal, savages that decimated all that they came across, but something in the bottom of your heart thought otherwise. But, the rumours grew, and so did curiosity. Countless hunting parties had rode through your village from the city, boasting loudly about the treasure they were going to bring back, always returning haggard looking and beaten, empty handed.  
Months had passed, and none of these mysterious beings had been caught, and you thought it was going to stay like that. You were certain that the tales of the creatures you had once loved so passionately was exactly that: just a tale to make the dark evening hours pass quicker.

Until one cold night, you stepped into the inn on your way back to your home after a long day at work. Some mead would do you good after a hard day tending the fields, and your muscles thanked you in earnest as you heavily sat in a wooden chair. Rosaline, one of the barmaids, was quick to settle a tankard in front of you and you gave her a copper in return, and she stayed for a while to chat. 

“Have you heard anything interesting lately?” you asked, taking a heavy drought from your drink. The familiar sweetness of the honey in the mead warmed you straight to your core, and your mood lifted instantly.  
“Nah, not much - although, I ‘eard that gentleman what’s o’er there ‘s goin’ on a trip. Up in the North, he says, one of them things bin spotted,” Rosaline gestured to the man sitting on his own in front of the fire, a pipe in his mouth. He looked relatively nondescript, with no features sticking out to you in particular - until he turned his head minutely, and the glow from the fire allowed his heavily scarred face to leap into life.   
You hadn’t seen someone so weather beaten since you visited the great city, and seen war veterans for the first time, with their gnarled smiles and eyes filled with sorrow. The man had seen some terrible things in his life, and there was something about him that intrigued you.

“Up North?” You asked, eyeing the man with interest. “He’s going alone, you said?” Rarely ever did travellers go alone, finding the roads too lonely and silent to keep your head screwed on properly without someone to have conversation with.  
“Yep, it’s what 'e said. Blimmin’ mad if you ask me.” Rosaline said, shaking her head slightly and moving away from your little table to serve other patrons.

You were pensive for several hours, staring into the depths of your drink and wondering. You had never had a great adventure in all of your life; the furthest you had travelled from your village was to the other side of the lake and back when you were a little girl, barely six summers old. What harm would it have, to see more of the world you lived in? Even if it did take months and you came back with nothing to show of your journey, it would be an experience like no other.

The old man stood up, and shuffled out the door as if he could hear your thoughts, and you were up and after him like a whip.

You were wondering, now, what you would be doing if you hadn’t chased after the man that night. If you hadn’t asked Rosaline whether she’d heard any rumours. If you hadn’t chosen to go into that inn that night for a rest before returning home.   
You imagined it would be a lot less thrilling than what you were doing now.

Weeks had passed, sending you further into the deepest bowels of the forests that even your father - a well travelled man and a formidable storyteller at the best of times - had never visited, and now you finally had something worth going home for.

“Shit, oh my God-!” you cried, seeing the tall figure crumple painfully to his knees. You darted forwards, trying to lift him up from under his armpits, but you were sent keeling over backwards as a heavy force hit you in the chest and shoved you backwards. Your lungs were emptied in a rush, but you still struggled to your feet, sending a glare at the old man you had grown to dislike heavily since that night in the inn before softening your gaze as you looked up at the being that had righted himself and now looking at you like you were a steaming pile of dog shit.  
The old man had yanked the angel forwards by the chains that ensnared him, and such cruelty rubbed you in entirely the wrong way, but your attempts to help had gone unappreciated, evident in the heavy blow you had received to your chest.

“I’m- I’m sorry, he isn’t at all patient and you just stopped walking an-and he yanked on the chains. I think your knees are bleeding...”  
He didn’t bother looking in your direction, merely turned his head and continued after the hunter that held his chains. You said nothing, sighing, and followed after the figure that tried his best to act like his pride wasn’t wounded by this entire situation.

The angel was beautiful, you mused. Despite his absolute disgust and abhorrence at being in your vicinity, and the constant downward curl of his mouth, he was the most stunning thing you had ever seen in your life. With his perfect blemish-free porcelain skin, the elegant slope of his nose and the rounded apples of his cheeks that were visible even through his disgusted expression, up to the elven points of his ears, you thought he had a rare kind of beauty that wasn’t often seen anymore; a kind of beauty from stories that had been read to you when you were a child. You were incredibly familiar with the tales of the angels, but you never thought you would ever see one in your lifetime - you were positively vibrating with poorly suppressed excitement. However, they were notoriously hostile towards humans, and, as your eyes raked over the chains encasing his wrists and the skin beneath that was beginning to turn red and sore, you thought they had a good reason to be.

“At your personal cost though, girlie,” the old man had said when you had run after him into the darkness of the night and begged him to take you along. You had thought he meant money or the like, but instead, you had been made to walk behind his horse the entire way there, no word of any payment needed leaving the mans gnarled and flat mouth. Four weeks straight into the deepest bowels of the forest, on foot. It was almost worth never returning to your village and merely starting a settlement here to avoid making the journey back.

At least now you had a walking companion, as standoffish and murderously angry as he was.

The ribbon of the path you were all following tapered to a passage akin to a thread, forcing the silent and mostly disgruntled party to walk single file, with you taking up the end and trying your hardest not to stare at the back of the angel’s head. His wings were as big as the ones you had seen in the drawings you had seen once upon a time, so many years ago. You thought his wingspan must be nearing eight feet, and you knew seeing him fly would be something magnificent.

Unfortunately, no human alive today had seen such a spectacle.

Nose wrinkling at the saddening and intrusive thought that this wonderful creature might never fly again, you sped up slightly to keep up with the lithe angel and the swiftness at which he walked. Surely his towering height was an advantage over your frustratingly short stature, and the old man on the horse was unrelenting in his rush to get back to the village and start collecting bids for the chance to glimpse such rare beauty in some disturbing and vulgar display, as if the angel wasn’t capable of thinking or feeling.

The leather of your boots had long since been broken into and moulded to the shape of your feet, but the ache in the muscles and bones of your legs was constant, barely being alleviated by a good night’s rest under the canopy of trees and the watchful gaze of the stars. You had brought along minimal belongings, only a few changes of clothes and as much food as you had in your shack of a house, being grateful that the old man seemed to know where most of the rivers that carved their way through the earth were.  
Squatting side by side, scrubbing and beating your clothes dry with a rock was the most interaction the two of you had.

“The woods are no place for a girl,” he’d kept reminding you before you set off from your village. “You’d do well to stay home and settle. Find yourself a nice, hardworking boy and start a family.”

You took no heed of his words, the idea of being trapped in Dawnstead your whole life making fear and horror spike through your being, instead merely packing your belongings up and waiting for him to gather his things and untack the horse to start the journey.

The harsh bracken and gnarled oak trees that stood sentry on either side of the gradually thinning path provided you with a false sense of comfort that the three of you were protected within the forest, that they were hiding you from view from malicious forces, but soon the firm ground gave way to muddy bogland that made squelching noises when you stepped through, sucking in your foot and putting up a fight when you tried to take it back.   
This terrain was no issue for the man on the horse or the divine being, both continuing along, entirely oblivious to your struggle. The distance between you was steadily increasing as the mud began to seep into the top of your boots, but you said nothing, not wanting to be a burden on a party that was already unimpressed with your presence. 

Eventually they disappeared amongst the silent trees and the shrubs, both of which suddenly seeming entirely too malignant in your eyes to be rational. You knew that you would catch up to the other two when the ground became solid again, but until then, you were all but on your own. 

Slogging through the mud for what could have been an hour, ignoring every single noise that echoed through the trees around you that would have scared you if you hadn’t spent a month travelling in the opposite direction, the pathway finally swelled to a much wider clearing, allowing you to see that the old man and the angel had stopped quite a way off, finally having noticed that you weren’t behind them.

As you neared them, the angel scanned your face and took in the ugly flush of your cheeks and the sweat that was beaded at your temple, his lip curling in disgust at the sight of the caked mud reaching your knees. A brilliant flush lit up your entire face in embarrassment rather than the sudden physical exertion of fighting against the earth, and you knew that you looked like an absolute state compared to him in his pristine glory.

He said nothing, letting his facial expressions do the work for him, and he noticed the way that your eyes flickered to him and then danced away, the flush deepening as you saw that he had caught you looking at him. Lip curling even further at the audacity of this human to even glance at him, Sicheng barely noticed the words that came from the old man.  
“Fall behind again, girlie, and I’ll leave you to the wolves.”  
Your face didn’t change, telling Sicheng that such callous words were commonplace amongst your people, and his hatred for your kind deepened. What an odd way to speak to their young. Perhaps violence equated to friendliness?

For another hour or so, the party of three continued to travel through the woods that never ended, not a single word shared. Even though there was more than enough room for you to walk alongside the other two, you felt uncomfortable, like that was breaching some unspoken rule, so you continued to trail behind them.   
You felt that you were more useful that way, out of sight and able to keep a broader eye for any danger that might threaten you.

Mostly, though, you kept your head down in case you accidentally made eye contact with the old man who occasionally glanced back to see whether you were there or had gone to meet your maker. You supposed the fake concern should have been mildly flattering, but you rather saw it as an insult. You had no plans to be killed any time soon.

You had only around a month left of this. It would all be fine when it was done; you would return to your usual routine in Dawnstead of working on a farm, staying out in the sun until your skin cracked and peeled, ploughing the ground that had long since lost the fertility that had once produced luscious bounties of the finest harvests seen that side of the lake. All of your constant labour resulted in a pittance at the end of the week, but you supposed that was enough for you; it kept a roof over your head, no matter the drafts or the leaks, and you didn’t go hungry as often as you used to since your parents died and your brother had left to work in Greater Dawnstead.  
You had a lot of friends, all as weather beaten and callous ridden as yourself, and you would all have merry lunches under the shady elm tree by the water mill, often removing your boots and dipping your sore feet into the cool rushes. You would be eternally grateful to Mr and Mrs Jacobsen for extending what little they had to include you.

It was a small life, with minimal excitement, but it was a good life.

The scenery around you changed as you travelled, breaks in the tree line allowing you to enter wide fields of wildflowers, wood mice dancing over your feet and scurrying away and hiding in the thicket of the tall flowers and grass that made your exposed skin itch. The three of you waded through shallow streams, the rushing water softening the mud that caked your boots and stripping it away, and you couldn’t help the laughter that left your lips as you kicked the water around, getting yourself soaked; sobering up immediately under the angel’s heated glare. 

The sun set between the peaks of the mountain as it always did in the distance, bringing a chill that bit at your skin and caused you to withdraw further into your tunic and sheepskin jacket that did very little to keep out the cold. The angle was all wrong to appreciate the true splendour of the sunset, but you supposed you would see it again when you returned home.   
Despite being preoccupied with not slipping and falling, you didn’t fail to examine the ethereal silhouette of the angel in front of you, and the way that he glowed under the last breaths of the sun despite the failing light. You now knew exactly what the person all those years ago was thinking when they named them ‘angels’ after God’s divine messengers.   
Not enough was known about these beings to actually know whether they came from the heavens, but everybody knew that their kind had been around for a lot longer than any human on this planet had. Entire civilisations had been built and they had prospered, but by the dawn of man their empires had collapsed and they had retreated into the deepest corners of the world. They had become elusive and they said that the sight of one was said to bless the beholder.

You didn’t feel particularly blessed, currently.

By the time night had properly fallen, coating everything around you in an eerie darkness and making your shadow dance under the moon, your legs and hips were begging for a rest and your eyelids were heavy.  
You weren’t sure if the old man would stop for another while, but your tiredness was beginning to overwhelm you, making you start to drag your feet and barely realise that the terrain had changed yet again from soft forest floor to a more rocky surface as you started to descend the mountain side and into the valley.  
The distance between you grew again but you didn’t even care this time, letting the darkness swallow you up, keeping your eyes trained on the moon above you. 

Whilst you walked, dragging your feet against the stony ground below you, you wondered what the angel’s name was. You would never find out, knowing that being told an angel’s name was the highest level of respect that no human had ever received. At least, not as far as you knew. 

You bet it was something beautiful. Something regal. Something-

Your face made contact with something solid, and you stumbled back, spluttering slightly and clutching your nose and chin. Blinking away the tears that accumulated from the sharp pain, you glared upwards at the angel who was already giving you a look so cold and murderous you would have shrunk back into yourself if you hadn’t been so pissed off, tired and hungry.

“Give me some warning next time.” you muttered quietly to yourself, not entirely intending him to hear but not being bothered if he did.  
His lip pulled back into a snarl, revealing a pearly white set of teeth you wouldn’t find anywhere in your village, and despite yourself you were momentarily dazzled.  
He was heartbreaking.

He said nothing, maintaining that stoic silence, and you just exhaled noisily through your sore nose.

“Watch your step here, girlie,” the man on the horse said. “It’s a long fall to your death.”  
Rolling your eyes, you turned your gaze to the left, swallowing heavily. You’d walked the same path going the other way, but there was something jarring about staring downwards, no ground in sight as you descended the mountain side. 

Rocks broke off and slid down in the chasm as the horse slowly traversed the terrain, the animal whinnying slightly and his ears swivelling. The old man had a hand on it’s neck, murmuring soothing words, and you wondered what he planned on doing if the horse decided to bolt. 

The angel would be in a sticky situation, that was for sure, being attached to the old man that rode the horse.

You continued walking, your eyelids continuing to feel sore and heavy and your head drooping down slightly.  
It was disappointing that you couldn’t find the energy within yourself to keep your head up long enough to take in the sight of the valley swathed in midnight, being a sight you would never get the opportunity to see again. You had heard from other travellers that would stop in the inn before continuing on their journey that the sight of the trees, bathed in the mist and standing silently under the moon was a sight like no other.   
It was something you had always dreamed of seeing, when the village was silent in the earliest hours of the morning and you were still awake, resting your chin in your hand as you gazed out the window towards the silhouette of the mountains, a gargantuan figure of darkness looming over your village.  
Some of the others thought that the mountain range was cursed, stealing the spirits of people who had ventured too far from the village borders, never to be seen again, but you thought of it as a kind of guardian protecting you all from the horrors that lived in the woods beyond the mountain. As far as you were concerned, it was the only thing preventing any unsavoury type from descending onto your little hamlet like a plague and snatching the children, disappearing into the night. 

Perhaps those were the words of the pastor that were finally beginning to sink into your head.

Maybe, you thought idly, you would set up camp somewhere soon and you would be able to take in the view of dawn breaking over the entire valley in the morning. To see such a vast expanse of land, trees, fields and perhaps the smoke from Dawnstead in the distance would be magnificent. If you were more artistically inclined, you would try your hardest to capture the sight with paints when you returned home, but such things were a luxury you could not afford, and so you would have to rely on your memory and your senses alone. 

Your tiredness got the better of you and your foot disappeared from underneath you, caught on a rock and making you stumble, gasp loudly and lunge forwards to clutch onto the cloth that swathed the angel.   
His reaction was instantaneous and wholly unexpected.

Whirling to face you, his hands gripped the front of your tunic and thrust you backwards, holding onto you tightly as he dangled your body halfway off the precipice. Your chest was heaving in shock and panic, feet dancing crazily as they tried to find purchase on the land, hands clutching onto his wrists - to do what, you weren’t sure - and your eyes were wide, staring into his and silently begging for mercy.  
You hadn’t meant to grab onto him like that, the situation causing you to instinctively hold onto something so you didn’t fall over the side, but you found yourself in a situation that was considerably more undesirable than falling off the cliff.   
Still, he said nothing, his lips pulled back into a snarl that was almost too animalistic for you to fathom, and the sight of his perfectly white and quite possibly razor sharp teeth inches from your face did little to calm you down. Rather, it only caused your heart to hammer loudly in your throat and your voice to take leave of you.

There was a very tense silence for a few moments, all the while you were desperately clawing at the creature’s hands and wrists and praying to any of the gods that he wouldn’t let go and watch you fall into the abyss. It would be slightly too easy to merely pass your death off as an accident - a clumsy girl blundered off the cliff side, tripped and fell into a ravine, wandered off and was never seen again, eaten by wolves - but you had hoped that the old man wouldn’t just stand and watch as the creature he held the chains of dangled your life in front of you like it was nothing, merely a speck to be brushed away.  
All the way through this, the only thing you could think was what your brother would do and who would tell him, if anybody. Perhaps he would visit for the first time in years and find nothing where he had left it, someone unfamiliar living in the shack you had both been raised in, his only living relative killed by a being he swore didn’t exist ever since your father first told you both about them.

You wondered if he would grieve or if he would shrug your existence off like he had since he had moved away and continue living his life. Perhaps the latter would be for the best.

“We’ll make camp,” the old man was saying despite the incredibly precarious situation. You would have gaped at him if you had the chance. “We’ll get some rest, find something to eat.”

At his words, the pupils of the being contracted from their blown out darkness and his fingers were latched onto your clothes a little less tightly. He pulled you forwards a few inches, allowing you to regain your footing on solid land, and didn’t even spare you another look as he continued on behind the old man.  
The old man was already staring at you, an expression you hadn’t seen before on his face and you wondered what he was thinking now about the creature he wanted to put on display. A bubble of hope began to swell in your chest at the thought that maybe he would let the angel go, obviously quite volatile and unsafe around other humans, but he just turned to face forwards and continued on the journey home.

Both of them were assholes, you decided.

When you finally got to a bit of land safe enough to sleep on, the old man slid off the horse and tacked it to an old oak that wound upwards dizzyingly far, and started unloading the side bags from the animal. You shucked your own burden, dropping your leather pack onto a part of the grass that wasn’t covered in rabbit droppings, and rolled out your shoulders.  
Firewood would be easy to come across as it hadn’t rained for several weeks and the wood was completely dry, but you weren’t sure what kind of food you might come across.

When you were younger, you and your brother would often venture into the woods to forage for food, scouring for berries in thick undergrowths, with him giving you a boost up to the higher branches of trees that bowed over with the heavy weight of fruit. You would drop them into his waiting hands below and clamber down, using your long skirts to pull up and use as a makeshift basket. Your mother was always scandalised when you came barrelling out of the woods with bare legs, but you never saw the harm in it; you were too excited to show her what you had gathered.  
Unfortunately, you were never very good at hunting - only having the know how to make a basic snare that would kill a rabbit - so usually your brother and father would go further, into the thicker parts of the forest in order to bring down bigger game like deer, or even sometimes wild boar depending on the season, whilst you and your mother stayed home and prepared whatever other food you had managed to gather.

The angel sat down cross legged against another tree, and the old man sat down slightly further away, stretching his legs out in front of him. Wordlessly, you turned and disappeared into the tree-line to see if the forest had anything good to give you or if you were all going to go hungry tonight.

Usually, there would be things like mushrooms or even truffles growing in the undergrowth this late into the year, but you weren’t sure if they would be plentiful enough to fill you all up and you also didn’t know if the old man would be willing to unpack a suitable container for you to prop over the fire you’d have to build in order to cook them and make the mushrooms less rubbery. Hopefully you would find something that could be eaten cold, like fruit or berries.  
Vaguely you wondered whether the old man was knowledgeable in berries too, or if you could have easily poisoned him this entire time.

Banishing the thought from your mind, you stopped not too far from the clearing you were camping in and started gathering small twigs and bits of wood that had fallen off the tree. You would use the smaller branches as kindling, bring them back to the camp and then go and find some proper firewood. Food would come after.

When you had a decent amount of twigs and branches, you started to head back to the clearing and prayed that the night stayed clear enough where you could use the moon to guide your way back. Otherwise, you’d be lost in the woods on your own until the sun rose again and that sounded particularly unpleasant.  
Returning to the clearing, you saw that the old man and the angel were still in the same positions you had left them in, except now the old man was smoking from his pipe and the angel had his eyes closed. Whether he could sleep sitting up like that you had no idea, and as you set the wood down in the middle of the clearing you wondered if his wings got annoying whilst he was sleeping or resting or anything else.

Although, you supposed he would be used to them if he’d been born with them.

As you turned to exit the clearing and go and find some proper firewood, his eyes snapped open and met yours, surprising you enough into stopping in your tracks. He didn’t say a word, merely letting his gaze drift from your meagre collection of kindling and back up to your face, eyes completely devoid of anything other than mild curiosity.   
There was something uncomfortably magical about standing in his gaze. Even though you were standing and he was sitting, you felt that he still managed to look down on you from a thousand miles above. His irises were like molten lava and you felt hot all over, even if there was a noticeable chill to the air. He was entirely enchanting and you were loathe to admit that you were completely enraptured.

He was the first to break the eye contact, his eyes drifting closed again, and some unfamiliar feeling of dejection washed over you. It was almost as if he had closed his eyes on you entirely, as if he was dismissing your entire existence, and you couldn’t understand what caused you to feel like that. All he did was close his damn eyes for crying out loud.  
In order to shake off the uncomfortable and unfamiliar feeling, you returned to the safety of the woods where he couldn’t see you, and set about gathering larger branches of sticks in order to build a fire that would keep all of you warm throughout the night. It was a quick job, seeing as the most useful branches were the ones that had already fallen and had dried out, and soon enough you were back into the woods with the aim of foraging for food.

If the previous month or so of your unspoken agreement continued, the old man would be building the fire whilst you looked for food. Despite this, you couldn’t help but feel that the workload was unequal, with you doing all of the work. If you weren’t there, would he just starve? Or would he have gotten off his ass in order to find food?  
Shaking your head, as you crouched down next to a promising looking bush, you almost failed to notice the soft tinkling music that met your ears.

Head snapping up in the direction, you could see that there was the warm glow of light, bringing with it the promise of warmth and friendship and, quite possibly, food. Hunger gradually started to gnaw at you, an ache striking through you like never before, your feet started to take you towards where the light broke through the trees.  
Voices drifted towards you, too; song and dance and merriment that you suddenly craved more than anything. Who were these people? Where had they come from? You hadn’t heard or seen anything of them the first few times you were foraging in this area for wood.

You got closer and closer, their voices getting louder and catching the scent of something marvellous. They had obviously cooked something for you to catch a scent like that and it was completely mouthwatering. Hopefully they would be willing to share with you, allowing you to gorge yourself on the feast they were having.  
You had never felt such a temptation like this.

Just as you were about to pass a hand through the edge of the clearing they were occupying, eyes trained firmly on the table laden with food and paying little attention to the strange figures that danced around it, you almost leapt out of your skin when a hand latched around you upper arm. Whirling, an exclamation of shock died in your throat when you found you were staring up into the face of the angel you had been travelling with.

“What-” you started but he held a finger up to his lips that silenced you immediately, even against your wishes. Your mouth was still moving, still trying to sound words, but they would not come.  
He didn’t say anything, eyes trained on the bright spectacle that was now behind you, and before you could turn to gaze at the happiness that you were nearly a part of, everything vanished.

Just like that.

The table was gone, the unclear, shadowy figures that danced around and called you in were no longer present. The food was gone and you could have wept in frustration. All that was left was the empty clearing and the smell of burning wood and succulent meat in the air.

“Wood elves,” the angel said, and you turned to face him again with your mouth hanging open and your eyes bulging out of your head. He had spoken to you! You didn’t even have time for this adjustment to settle into your mind before he was speaking again. “They lure in foolish travellers that are never seen again. Do not let your mind wander.”

With that, he turned and headed back to the clearing and in the back of your suddenly hazy mind, an alarmed thought passed through wondering how he had gotten away from the old man in order to come after you.  
You traipsed after him, exhilarated and thrilled that he had chosen to speak to you, even if he had called you a fool. You hadn’t heard of any stories where angels had talked to humans in this lifetime and your mind was reeling. What did this mean? Why did he speak? Why did he even bother coming after you?

As you scoured the area for berries and other edible goods, a smile would not leave your face. His voice was lovely; like the richest velvet caressing your skin; like the bubbling rushes you would dip your feet into after a long day tending to the fields; like finding a cool bit of shade to laze in on a particularly hot day. You couldn’t even define with words the feeling his voice gave you, but it felt like something you’d never get to experience again - a fleeting glimpse of the heavens, almost.  
He was magical.

By the time you returned to the camp, the fire was crackling wonderfully in the middle of the clearing and you saw that the angel was sat back in his spot, eyes still closed and wrists still firmly in steel manacles. You were confused, and more than a little alarmed at the fact that he could apparently free himself without being noticed at will, but you were left in such a daze that he had actually said a string of words to you for the first time since his capture to do anything about it.  
You sat down on the grass between the angel and the old man, unfurling the bottom of your shirt and revealing what lay within.

You had found chestnuts, whole and protected in their spiky shells, along with blackberries and even a few wild strawberries so large you were convinced only a handful would fill you up. 

“I think it would be best if we roasted the chestnuts,” you said, looking down on your collection with a warm kind of pride. There was something wonderful about knowing that you could survive on what the world gifted you alone. “But I’m not sure if we have anything we would be able to roast them in.”  
The old man hummed but offered nothing, and despite his willingness to talk earlier you didn’t bother turning to the angel to see if he had anything to suggest. 

Refusing to sigh and show your exasperation with the two men, you simply split the food into piles and presented only the berries to the old man, making sure enough were kept aside for yourself and the angel.   
He accepted them without a word, cupping his hands in order to receive them and gave you an appreciative nod, and you turned to the angel in order to give him some. He wasn’t even looking at you, instead staring at the fire with such an intensity you were convinced that his gaze alone was what sparked the flames in the first place.

“I’m sorry it’s not more substantial,” you offered. “It’s too dark to see if the trees bore any fruit, and I don’t have the right equipment that I could use to make a snare or anything.”  
He finally turned to look at you, but he didn’t make eye contact, instead choosing to look only at the fruit you offered him. He blinked, but showed no emotion on his face as he shuffled slightly closer to accept the berries.

You were careful not to touch him in case you caused the same amount of offence as earlier, and you couldn’t help but continue to stare even after the exchange was over and done with. He didn’t start to eat, but the way that the light from the fire danced across his face truly took your breath away.

You were almost annoyed at how often you thought how beautiful he was, but you had never seen anybody that looked like him. Even the woodcutter’s son who had soft features and plump lips didn’t hold a candle to the being sat next to you.   
Suddenly you were stressed about how grimy you looked next to him in his perfectly flawless glory. Hopefully tomorrow you could come across a stream and you would separate from the two of them in order to give yourself a proper scrub. In your village, you were more likely to catch gout than have a bath, but when you got properly grimy you could always take a dip in the river. Throughout the warmer months most of the village children would play and frolic in the water too, splashing each other and playing games whilst their mothers watched warily for any signs of danger as they chattered happily with other women.  
You were in the odd grey area where you were too old to play in the water, having other responsibilities on the farm to attend to, and you were also too young to socialise and gossip with the housewives and other maids without getting bored. So, you and a few others around your age would retreat into the treeline and find a great oak to laze under, exchanging tall tales and dozing in the warmth of the sun.

Your stomach lurched with homesickness.

Whilst you were too busy daydreaming about your homelife, the angel had eaten his food and was sitting quietly next to you, staring into the fire as you did. Even though you weren’t even sitting particularly close, he emanated a warmth that you knew wasn’t coming from the fire. It was calming and reminded you of the sweet embrace of your mother, and that unsettled you more than anything.   
He was stunning, yes, but there was something mysterious about him that made you feel that you couldn’t ever trust him fully.

You wouldn’t be quick to forget that he could leave the metal that bound him any moment he wanted to.

As you gorged yourself on your berries, the old man lit his pipe again and you wondered where he had stored enough tobacco to keep himself going throughout this entire journey. You didn’t bother to enquire, however, knowing you’d be fixed with a hard stare that was becoming all too familiar, so you reached into your leather pack and pulled out your water skin, still mostly full from the last stream you passed.

You sipped some of it, knowing to drink enough to keep you going but little enough to sustain it should you not pass by another stream for a while, but you knew that the angel hadn’t drank anything today either. Turning to face him, your eyes immediately fixated on the way that the fruits had stained his lips a darker blood red and made them look almost unfairly kissable.  
You had spent most of your childhood playing rough and tumble games with the boys of your village, finding yourself too bored with too much energy left to burn by the games the other girls would play, but that didn’t mean you hadn’t run off to the woods and played childish kissing games with them, too. All of you were too young to properly grasp the meaning of a kiss, but you knew better now. You understood from experience; when you had presented the woodcutter’s son, Lucas, with a gentle kiss on the cheek in the town square, barely ten summers old, the word ‘betrothal’ had been tossed around carelessly for weeks.  
Nowadays, his eyes were firmly on the baker’s daughter and you were only too supportive of their budding relationship, paired with flushed cheeks and secret glances, fidgety fingers and the feeling of spring in the air.

You passed your water skin to him, ensuring he had a proper grip on it before you relinquished it to him entirely. He pressed it to his lips, gulping hungrily, but you didn’t say anything to slow him down. If he was this thirsty, you didn’t know how long it had been since he had last drank any water at all. You’d try your best to persuade the old man to find a stream so you can collect more water for the angel.

He passed it back to you with nothing more than a small nod in your vague direction, but that was alright with you. Perhaps he didn’t want to speak in front of the old man; either way, you knew it was incredibly uncommon for one of their kind to speak in front of any human, let alone two. That would be asking too much of him.  
The old man reclined backwards, still puffing away at his wooden pipe that looked about the same age as himself, and you retreated to the other side of the fire with your pack. Dropping it onto the floor, you knelt down and tried to arrange it into a somewhat comfortable shape for you to rest your head on. Then, lying down and using it as a pillow, you basked in the warmth the fire provided you and lay on your back, staring up at the sky embezzled with a million stars, and wondered what the next day would hold.

-

Four more days passed in a similar fashion. You would wake up, eat whatever you could find around whatever camp you had set up, and then you would walk until you couldn't anymore. Then you’d set up camp, gathering more wood and more food. You’d always make sure that the angel had enough to eat, knowing that he was much bigger than you and probably needed more sustenance.  
He would hesitate less and less each time you offered him any kind of food, whether it was herbs you’d picked from the forest floor, even more berries or even a rabbit that you’d roasted on a stick over the fire. Each time he would sit minimally closer to you and you pretended that you didn’t notice, but internally your mind was screaming at you.

He wasn’t exactly your best friend, but the way he would slow down his stride when you were travelling over a particularly rough terrain and he would spare you little glances to make sure you were still there made your heart and your cheeks feel warm.   
The situation was unsavoury for the two of you, but it wasn’t until the sixth day that you made proper progress in your incredibly strange and unexpected camaraderie.

It was the caw of a crow that woke you up.  
Jerking upright, your head swimming with the speed at which you rose, you glanced blearily around your little camp. The old man was still sleeping, snoring heavily and completely dead to the world, but the angel was completely gone.

Clambering to your feet in panic, you looked crazily around the campsite as if he had merely sat and waited for you to catch him, but it was empty. There wasn’t a single sign he had ever been there.  
Hissing a curse through your teeth, you didn’t bother waking the old man just to face his wrath and instead decided to check the area of forest around the camp to see if he had merely decided to sleep under the safety of the trees. Perhaps he had left footprints that you would be able to follow him with, but with wings that size, you doubted he ever really walked anywhere if he could avoid it. 

Surely, if he could slip out of the cuffs so easily, he would have done when he was initially captured? Why did he stick around for so long?

Traipsing through the woods, your mind was completely filled with shouted curses and expletives that would make your parents turn in their graves if they ever heard them. Did he wait until you had both fallen asleep before making his escape? Did he take anything with him? Was this his whole plan, to make you give him food and water that would sustain him before returning to where his kind resided and exchanging tales of the two bumbling humans that thought they could keep him ensnared?

Your mind was cut off when you reached what looked like an orchard.

Hundreds of trees - which wasn’t unusual to you, being as you were blundering through a forest - but each of them heavy with fruit, ripe for the picking. Apples so red it was as if the sun had focused all of its energy on just this plot of land, caring for it and raising these trees from saplings. They were all systematically planted, all in perfectly straight lines that would make Mr Jacobsen weep with joy, but your eyes zeroed in on a tall, pale figure a few trees away from you.  
Making a beeline for him, you opened your mouth and started complaining before even reaching him.

“By the gods, you scared me! I thought I’d have to wake the old man up and tell him you’d run off!” He didn’t respond, not that you expected him to, but he turned to you with a face of complete blankness as if he’d expected you to be there.  
Maybe he’d heard you stumbling through the forest a mile away.  
“What’s this orchard, anyway? I didn’t know there were farms this far east of the mountains. Is there a village nearby?” You glanced around as if you thought the farmhouse would materialise out of thin air before your very eyes. “There’s nothing like this on the maps and I’d’ve heard of an orchard of this size from travellers.”

He was still silent, merely gazing at you as you looked around cluelessly. Your stomach grumbled and your cheeks lit up brilliantly with embarrassment, but you bit your lip as you looked up at him.  
“Do you think they’d notice if we took a few apples? Just enough to keep us going. We’ll have to bring some back for the old man, too, or he’ll die from his own bloody laziness.”

Your mind was already made up, morals be damned. Lifting your leg up and yanking off one of your boots, knowing you’d be able to climb the tree better if you could use your toes too, you approached the tree he was standing silently under and gripped onto the lowest branch and heaved yourself up.  
Your brother wasn’t here to receive the apples you dropped, but you figured the angel had to be useful for something.

“Here,” you called down when you were high up in the branches of the tree. “I’ll pick the best ones and drop them down. You try and catch them so they don’t bruise!”  
Reaching out towards the furthest apple, you twisted it carefully off the branch so you didn’t cause unnecessary damage to the tree. Looking down, you saw the way the angel’s eyes stared at you from below and for a reason unknown to you, you held your breath as you dropped it down to him.  
He was still and you thought he was just going to let it drop, preparing yourself to lecture him angrily for it, but at the last moment his hand snatched out and grabbed the apple from mid air so quickly you nearly missed it. It looked almost as if the apple had completely vanished from thin air until you saw it in his hand at his side.  
“Don’t worry,” you teased from above him. “I’ll make sure I pick plenty for you too, you don’t need to covet them like an apple hoarder!”

You picked all of the best looking apples from the tree, hoping and praying that the landowner wouldn’t suddenly appear below you and demand payment for the goods you were stealing.   
When you thought you had picked the good ones from this tree, you climbed down the tree and rejoined him, all of the apples in a small pile at his feet. He was looking down at it with a curious expression, but to your surprise, you didn’t even have to ask what the matter was.

“I think we will need more than this.”

Just as it had before, his voice took your breath away, but this time you noticed how careful his words were, how hesitant he was to speak, as if he was afraid of making a mistake. Perhaps his kind spoke a different language and he wasn’t too familiar with this one? You had never heard of them speaking something other than the tongue of this land, but perhaps that would explain why they didn’t ever communicate with humans.  
Shaking your head at yourself, you led him to another tree and he watched as you climbed this one too.

“The best apples are always the ones at the top,” you called down to him. “They get the most sunlight. I think they taste better too, but I suppose that’s a matter of opinion.”  
You continued dropping apples to him, watching in silent awe as he would always snatch them out of the air before they could hit the floor. His reflexes were very good, you mused, and you wondered what he usually did that allowed him to refine them to such perfection.   
The day before you wouldn’t have bothered asking him anything about his home life, but it seemed he was more likely to talk when he was away from the old man, so you tried your luck.

“Do you eat apples?” you asked, and he turned his blank face to you again. “I mean, back home. What kind of stuff do you eat?”  
He was quiet, and you thought he wasn’t going to answer you at all, but then his shoulders lifted as he inhaled a deep breath and his mouth opened.  
“We eat the same food as you but,” he paused. “I am not a… food man.”  
Realising that he might not know the word, you helped him along as you continued to pick more apples.   
“You don’t gather? You don’t hunt or anything?”

There was an even shorter pause this time as he carefully chose his words and crafted his sentence in his head.  
“No, I am a scholar,” he told you. “I do not… Gather or hunt.”  
You hummed thoughtfully. Never before had you heard of angels having different social roles within their communities, but you supposed they must have done.

If this one was a scholar, he must know a lot about your kind. There was endless literature and information about you and humankind as a whole, and although you didn’t know how he would be able to get his hands on these things, you guessed he must have if he was quite proficient in your language.   
You felt even stupider and inadequate than you did last night.

“Well, I’m no scholar, but I could tell you which berries can kill you and which can’t. That’s a kind of smart.”  
“Yes,” he said. “A kind of smart.”

You didn’t have much to say to him after that, despite everything. You didn’t want to press him for more information about his kind, knowing that they were probably quite secretive about their existence, but he seemed unconcerned about the information he had already shared with you.  
He was a scholar.   
Your village was small and poor so you didn’t get too many educated folk come through - as far as you knew, the apothecary and your father were the only men that were or had been able to read in your entire village - but sometimes monks and religious people on pilgrimages to the cathedral in Greater Dawnstead would pass through. Sometimes you had seen them read from large, ancient books they lugged around, or scribbling something on parchment by candlelight in a quiet corner in the inn.  
You weren’t sure if those men could be counted as “scholars,” but picturing the angel doing similar things made you feel uncomfortably hot.

He suited it, you decided. He looked like a scholar.

When you felt you had gathered enough apples, you clambered down from the tree and pulled off your sheepskin jacket, placing all of the apples into it and pulling the edges together into a makeshift bag.  
Then, you gestured him to follow you back to the camp to deposit the apples and wake up the old man.

Before you could bend down and nudge the man awake, you were suddenly hit with the chilling thought that this person was not supposed to be out of his handcuffs.  
You whirled around to pin him with an accusatory stare, but you saw something you would have sworn came straight from a fairytale.

He was crouched next to the old man too, his hands extended as if he was about to receive a gift from him, palms facing towards the sky and fingers slightly curled as if clutching onto something. It was as if he was carefully enticing the chains from the old man; like coaxing a rabbit out of its burrow. The chains snaked like vines towards the angel of their own volition, trailing towards him and up into the air, wrapping around his wrists and capturing him again like poison ivy.  
You had never seen anything like that in all your years, and all you could do was gape at him as he sat down calmly, as if he hadn’t just somehow animated mere metal with a thought.

You were dazed, staring cluelessly at the angel who didn’t even raise his eyes from the ground that he was so focused on. Not wanting to think too hard about what you had just seen, you busied yourself with splitting the apples into two piles; one for you and the angel, and one for the old man. You crammed most of your pile into your bag, knowing that the angel couldn’t carry his own, and when you had safely stowed away all you could carry you wandered over to the old man and nudged him gently with your foot.

 

He snorted, trying to swat your foot away, but you merely sank the tip of your boot further into his side and rolled him over. He awoke with a start, peering around the camp as you had when you woken up and found the angel missing.   
When the old man’s eyes landed on you and he started his usual early morning griping, your mind drifted away to the events of merely several minutes ago. Turning your attention to the silent figure still sitting cross legged on the floor, you thought that maybe it had been a trick of the light; that he had reached for the chains and reattached them himself, but your sleep deprived and exhausted mind and made it seem that they had moved on their own towards him. That had to be it, surely?

Yet, you couldn’t help but remind yourself of the creatures you had seen in the forest less than a week earlier, and how he had pulled you away from them, calling them wood elves. There was something incredibly humbling about the realisation that humans were not the most powerful beings on the earth, and that there are forces much more dangerous at play than you could have possibly imagined.

By the end of the first week, the three of you had made a good distance into the valley, leaving the largest of the mountains behind. For a reason unknown to you, the old man had deemed it unsafe to continue travelling through the mountain pass, and so you had started to travel further West on flat land before looping round the lake. Apparently, you were to avoid Greater Dawnstead and would instead travel all the way around the lake and back up to Lower Dawnstead, where you lived.  
Whenever the old man was sleeping, or had for some reason left you and the angel unattended, you would have short conversations. For obvious reasons, you did most of the talking, filling him on your unexciting life in the hamlet, but he would contribute where he thought he could.

You told him all about the fields in the summer, how lush the grass was and how pleasant a breeze felt across your uncomfortably hot and sunburned skin. He particularly liked hearing about the animals you had helped rear, the lambs you would receive in the spring and the calves you would lead around the paddock, encouraging them to build their strength and stamina. In return, he told you about his life in seclusion, how he and his brothers would spend hours at a time pouring over old tomes, spending most of his time indoors. He told you that he didn’t often venture outdoors, finding no need to, and preferred staying in the dimly lit caves where his colony lived.  
Vaguely, it registered in your mind that the only caves for miles around were far in the East and it would take months for you to travel there, even by horse. You wondered what he was doing so far in the North, but by the time you had thought you ask him, the old man reappeared from the trees, a few rabbits dangling from his hand by their feet, or on the best days, an entire deer slung around his shoulders like a trophy.

“Are you lonely?” you asked one day when you were crouched in a stream, boots removed and trousers rolled up to your knees. The old man had disappeared once again and you were trying your hand at fishing, although you didn’t know if this stream even had any or if it was the right time of year. The angel was still chained up, secured to the horse that was grazing on the bank and the angel was sat with his feet in the stream too. He didn’t make any complaints, but you knew that his feet were as sore as yours were after all this walking, even he only had leather sandals to protect his rather than your hardy boots.  
“What do you mean?” he asked in return, and you were quiet for a few moments, tasting the next words that were on your lips.  
“Do you miss your family? Do you have family?”

He looked thoughtful, tracing his fingertips through the water and humming.  
“I have family,” he told you. “I have lots of family, there are a great many of us.”  
“Do you miss them?”  
“Yes, but I will see them again.”

You were unsure what to say to that, not knowing how to tell him that the old man planned to have him caged up and his very nature restrained. 

“I don’t have any family,” you said, turning to stare down at the water again. No fish had passed by and you knew this stream was depleted, but the coolness of the liquid felt good where the leather of your boots had rubbed your feet and there was a strange kind of serenity around the area. The angel was watching you with an emotion you couldn’t decipher in his eyes. “My Dad was killed in a bandit raid when I was only fourteen, and my Ma perished of a fever not even three moons later. By the time I was fifteen, my brother left to Greater Dawnstead to seek his fortune. I haven’t heard from him since.”   
“Where is Greater Dawnstead? You have mentioned it before.”  
“It’s further up the river, on the side of Lake Solaius. It’s a city, surrounded by stone walls and protected by men in steel armour. Travellers I’ve met have told me that only blood and gold flow through their gilded streets, but I’ve only been once when I was young, so I couldn’t tell you whether that was true or not. My village is called Lower Dawnstead because it’s further down the river, therefore poorer, which is why my brother moved on to bigger and better things.”  
“I am sorry.”  
“No need. At least I know how to support myself, and fend for myself, if need be. Most of the lads back home can’t even claim that.”  
“You are so…” he trailed off, struggling to find the right words. He wasn’t even looking directly at you but you felt the weight of his unspoken word heavy on your shoulders. What was he trying to say? Was it derogatory? Was he trying his best to put down your kind, to criticise them for not having the same kind of bonds with each other as his own people?

Before you could find out, the old man returned, this time empty handed. You didn’t have a clue what he did whenever he disappeared for gradually longer intervals, and you weren’t interested, but you were always enraged whenever he came back. In an odd sort of way, you wished he would wander into the forest and never return, leaving you and the angel to converse about everything you didn’t know about each other. You had come to treasure the moments you could spend alone, and you never wanted them to end, even after you returned to Dawnstead.  
On the other hand, the angel would have no reason to stay, and you would rather free him than continue escorting him to a life you were certain he would rather not live if he could avoid it. 

“Few more leagues West and we can start looping back South again.” he told you both, and you only nodded in reply, quietly disgruntled by his very existence.

How could he do this? Why did you think to come along? This was what caused the first empires of the angels to collapse in the first place; the brutality of man, and their murderous, barbaric ways. Only a human could be so callous as to enslave such a wonderful person. Only a human could throw around their authority like this, as if they were the ones with dominion over all other living beings.  
Why was he still here? He could leave at any time he wanted, and yet, it seemed he chose to stay, he chose to be at the mercy of this man who was clearly considerably dumber than himself.

You didn’t understand.

On the sixth day of the third week, when you were approaching familiar land and could recognise some buildings - an abandoned windmill, an old silo with the roof caved in and spilled animal feed long since eaten by birds - it rained like you had never seen.  
When you woke up on hard ground, the first thing you saw were the heavy looking clouds above and instantly knew that it was going to rain. 

Leaping up to your feet, you were quick to wake the angel from his slumber, heart stuttering pathetically at the way he blinked up at you and smiled warmly. Cheeks slightly flushed, you woke the old man next, informing him that the forest was too quiet and the clouds too dark for you to feel comfortable lying out in the open like this.   
You were in the deepest point of the valley, there was no chance for you to venture to higher ground, so you would have to brave whatever you were faced with.

Admittedly, it was more than you expected. 

By noon, you were absolutely drenched to the bone and shivering like a stray cat. Your hair hung limply at the sides of your face and you had wrapped your arms tightly around yourself in a pathetic attempt to conserve as much warmth as possible. It was fruitless; if you didn’t find shelter soon, you were going to become incredibly sick and travelling the last stretch until you made it home would become impossible. 

“Hey,” you called ahead, trying your best to be heard over the cacophony of the rain pelting against the trees and the muddy ground ahead of you. The angel turned to face you immediately, holding fast onto the chains until the old man turned to see what the hold up was. Nodding at him in thanks, you slogged through the mud so you were alongside the horse and stared up at the old man that was just as drenched as you were. “We need to find some kind of shelter and wait out this storm, or we’ll all get sick and add another week to our journey.”  
He didn’t say anything, regarding you with the hard critical look you had been receiving since you met him that one late evening.

He swung the horse around, heading back in the direction you came. At your questioning look, he finally opened his mouth and graced you with his voice.  
“Saw a few promising looking overhangs in the rocks we passed about half a mile back. Should be decent enough shelter.”

You stepped back, allowing him to pass you on his horse, and goosebumps rose along your flesh when the angel’s arm brushed against yours as he passed you too. Taking up your usual position at the back of the group, all the way to the overhang the old man mentioned, you were transfixed by the sight of water dripping off the feathers of his wings. This, you thought, was surely the benevolent beauty you had heard your priest crow about all hours of the day. There was nothing in the world that was more exquisite than the figure that walked ahead of you. Nothing in the world.

The overhang the old man had brought you to was just a small part of rock that jutted out from the rest of the rock surface in an uneven manner, meaning that you could only fit at most two people to a little outcrop. Resigning yourself to be separated from the other two, you almost dropped dead in shock when the angel moved to join you, despite the chains that held him to the man.

The man himself had an odd look on his face, as if he couldn’t decide which emotion to show the most of towards the angel for whatever kind of insubordination he had just displayed by going to follow you, but decided that it wasn’t worth the hassle. Merely handing the chains to you and retreating to another part of the rock face he could shelter under, you were flabbergasted at this turn of events.  
You could free him right now, and then flee into the woods. The man could try to chase you, and would probably catch you on your way home if he was on horseback, but you would have done the right thing and so your conscious would be clear.

The angel moved past you, retreating under the shelter, and you were quick to join him, sharing a small space and trying your best not to focus on the heat that was radiating from him. He was impossibly warm and if you didn’t already know that from previous encounters you’d be terrified that he’d already caught a fever.   
As it was, he was already looking rather comfortable as he settled on the floor, careful not to crush his gargantuan wings against the wall.   
“Are they just like normal limbs?” you asked, dropping the chains in a pile at his feet and sitting next to him, dumping your pack at your own feet.

The floor was mercifully dry and you wondered how long it would take for the rain to ease up until it was rational to go out in it. However, you also hoped that it would take hours and hours, giving you more time to spend with him.

“My wings?” he asked, looking at you with those dark eyes you were incredibly fond of. “Yes, I suppose so. A bit heavier than an arm, though.”  
“They look it. Do you have to, like, groom them?”  
“Groom?”  
“Yeah, y’know, pluck them and stuff when they get messy.” You had seen poultry do the same on the farm, but you weren’t sure if he would be offended by you likening him to a chicken or not.  
“Oh, yes. But I don’t think I have to right now,” Then, surprising you, he extended the one furthest from you and pulled it round in front of him so he could examine the feathers. They weren’t as beautiful as they usually were, being as he had been caught in the rain alongside you, but they still had an ethereal quality about them that stole the very breath from your lungs.  
Mindlessly, you reached out to touch it with your hand, but rather than react in the aggressive way he had previously when you had grabbed him to save yourself from plummeting to your death, he moved the wing even closer to you as if he was encouraging your touch.

They were unbearably soft, if a little damp, but you enjoyed the sensation of raking your fingers down them slowly. The whole situation was incredibly overwhelming, and the way your bottom lip trembled showed that you were about to lose the tight hold on your emotions at any moment.

Pulling away, you settled back against the rock face and grinned up at him, with him giving you a gentle smile in return as he turned and tucked the wing safely behind him again.   
“They’re incredibly beautiful. I wish that I had a pair, but I’m just a boring human.” You were saying it in jest, of course; you were aware that there were privileges to being a human that he didn’t have, but he was so exquisitely beautiful that you couldn’t help but want to look even slightly like he did.  
“I think that you are wonderful.” he said, so innocently that you almost didn’t believe he’d said it at all. 

You turned your head to stare at him in shock, surprised that he would say such a thing in the situation he was in. 

“W-What?” Your cheeks were uncomfortably hot and you were beginning to become annoyed at how easily he could make you all flustered. Back home, you spent most of your time around other men, but nobody had ever made your heart feels was weak as he did.  
“You are wonderful,” he repeated as if you hadn’t heard him very well the first time.   
“But…” you floundered around in your head, desperately thinking of ways to dispute what he’d said. “But you’re chained up! I was there when you were captured and I just stood there and I did nothing. I’ve been helping him bring you home where you’ll be caged up and put on display like you’re, like you’re just a trophy! I’m not wonderful, please, don’t say that. The guilt will kill me.”  
He remained calm all the way through your little explosion of emotions, and initially you weren’t sure if he’d understood everything that you’d said to him as you’d said it quite quickly. Then-  
“You are not the one holding my chains,” he told you, gesturing to the pile you’d left at his feet. “You have given me companionship, and food. You’ve been a comfort on this journey.”

Just as you were about to open your mouth to give him more reasons why you weren’t a good person and he shouldn’t think of you as such, he placed one hand on your left cheek, shocking you into silence.  
“You are not like the man,” he told you, staring so deeply into your eyes you were afraid he could read your mind and feel how hard your heart beat for him. “You are a friend.”

Tears lined your eyes and started flowing down your face, much to the angel’s dismay. His second hand cupped your other cheek and he tried his best to wipe away your tears, but it proved to be a useless mission as more took their place.  
“Don’t cry,” he cooed repeatedly at you. “I did not mean to offend you.”   
“You didn’t,” you cried pathetically, hands reaching up to hold onto his wrists. It felt a little like deja vu, the way that you were clinging to him tightly, but this time you weren’t afraid for your life; you were terrified for the state of your heart. “I’m really happy.”  
“You cry when you are happy?” he asked, bewildered. “Humans are very peculiar.”  
“Yeah.” you agreed, smiling through your tears and sniffling slightly.

His face was unbearably close to yours, and usually this would have embarrassed you, but you felt nothing but comfort. He was familiar to you now, and as magnificent as he looked, you felt safe. This comfort was disrupted, however, by the way he tugged your face ever so slightly closer to his own and you could see each individual eyelash and the way his pupils were blown wide, darkness swallowing the chocolate warmth of his irises.

You stopped breathing.

Closer and closer he drew you, his sweet breath washing over your face, and you think that if it were anybody else you would have jerked away and sprinted into the woods, but you were intrigued. You were fascinated. You were completely enamoured by him.  
“What’s your name?” you whispered just before his lips met yours.  
“Winwin.” He told you, and then he was kissing you.

Other girls had told you in the past that when they were kissed by their sweethearts, it felt hot. They said that they felt it all over their bodies, and that they felt within themselves a carnal desire that you had never experienced before.  
Kissing him didn’t feel like that; it felt like so much more.

It was that first peek of sunlight through the clouds when it had finally stopped raining; it was wrapping yourself up in a blanket you’d warmed by the fire on a cold winter’s night; it was the feeling you’d get when you find a bush laden with fruit and you’d sit and gorge yourself until your cheeks and chin were stained with juice and your heart would feel lighter than air; the feeling you’d get whenever your father would take turns swinging you and your brother into the lake on the hottest days of the year. 

Kissing him, kissing Winwin, felt like all the good things in the world had come to you at once, and you never wanted it to stop.

He seemed to feel the same, judging by the way his hands dug into your hips and lifted you, swinging you over onto his lap as if you weighed no more than the pack you had been carrying all this time. He was everywhere on your body; his fingers tangled in your hair before sliding down and resting on your hips, then rising again and cupping your cheeks, angling your head so he could kiss you deeper. You were unusually pliant under his hands, allowing him to do whatever he wanted to do with you, and you had never been in such a transcendent state of euphoria in your life.  
If you weren’t careful, you would become dangerously addicted.

Yet, by the way he let out a groan from deep in his throat when you fisted your hands in his hair and tugged gently, making a heat burn through your body, you worried that you were already too far gone.

You ended up staying in your little shelter all the way through the night, and by the time the rain let up, the morning had broken over the mountains again and your stomach was uncomfortably hollow. You blinked yourself awake, wondering how you could possibly be so warm when you hadn’t been able to light a fire last night with all of the wood being sopping wet, and then realised with a start that you were encased in the safety of the angel’s arms.  
You had never slept in a man’s embrace before and waking up to the fact that you had done - and in the arms of a man that looked like Winwin, no less - filled you with the strangest emotion. It was like a slightly nervous excitement; apprehension, if you will. Truthfully, you were terrified that the old man would notice the complete change in the dynamic of your relationship, particularly when you were reduced to a silent, blushing mess when you made eye contact. He didn’t, though, and off you went on your journey, ensuring that you had scoured the area for any food you might be able to take from the land to fill your bellies.

Thankfully you had been able to make a snare out of a branch you’d broken in half and a thick cord of ivy you’d cut from a tree, but you’d only been able to catch two rabbits by the time the pathetically small fire you’d been able to construct from thankfully dry twigs and leaves was burning hot enough to cook anything on it. Not wanting to waste time, you quickly skinned the rabbits and speared them with longer, sharper branches, propping them over the fire and handing one off to the old man and the other to Winwin when they were properly roasted. You were content to eat only the few berries you had managed to gather, and the last of the apples you had picked with Winwin a few weeks prior. However, Winwin obviously thought differently, shuffling closer and brandishing the rabbit towards you.  
You shook your head, gesturing silently towards what you were sure would fill you enough until dinnertime, but he was adamant. When you continued to refuse the rabbit, he huffed a heavy sigh and sank his teeth into it’s flesh. Relieved that he had started eating, you were incredibly shocked when, as you opened your mouth to pop a wildberry in, his quick fingers shoved a chunk of rabbit into your mouth and then pushed your jaw closed so you had no choice but to chew and swallow.  
When you gave him your best outraged look, he had merely blinked innocently at you, continuing to eat the rabbit. However, every now and then he would physically force a piece of it into your mouth and you found it easier to just accept it than silently fight against him.

At least he looked proud of himself.

For the most part, everything was just as it had been since you met - you would all walk in silence, with you taking up the end, and the old man would rarely spare you any words unless it was to demand something of you, or tell you how far you were from home.   
The only difference were the kisses Winwin would steal from you, the affectionate caresses of your face and any skin he could reach when the old man wasn’t looking, and you couldn’t help but feel that a storm was brewing. You didn’t know what you thought you were doing, having such a relationship with an angel, and you had no idea how it was going to play out when you finally arrived in Dawnstead.   
Honestly, it had crossed your mind a few times that Winwin was only entertaining you, humouring you as a means of protection - that you would try and fight for him to be free when you were released from the old man’s company and he would be caged up like a pet bird. But, you thought, if he wanted to be free from his chains, he could easily just make them fall from his wrists like liquid silver and escape. 

So, what was it that he wanted from you?

By the time you arrived at the far side of Lake Solaius in the fourth week of your journey home, night had fallen again and you were readying yourself to try your best to gather more food.  
An exhaustion that you were familiar with had started to settle into your bones, and you would be grateful for the warmth of your bed and a few days of rest. However, your heart felt impossibly heavy; the time for you to say goodbye to Winwin was drawing ever closer, and you didn’t know if you’d be able to do it.  
You gathered the firewood as you always did, depositing it with the old man who moved quickly to assemble it and attempt to spark some flames, the chill in the air becoming more and more biting with every passing day. Instead of returning to gather the resources in order for you to build a snare and catch a small animal that lived in the woods for you to cook and serve, you stood there and stared at the gradually assembled fire.

You didn’t see anything particularly profound, and you weren’t pondering the meaning of life, but you were thinking about Winwin. You would have to free him. It wouldn’t sit right in your stomach to leave him to whatever fate the old man was keen to send him to, and your heart would bleed for days if you let him suffer. How you would do it, you weren’t sure, but you knew that you would.  
How long the old man would stay in Lower Dawnstead, you would have to find out. Perhaps he would take Winwin to Greater Dawnstead in search of a bigger fortune than one he could find in the dirt tracks of your little village, and maybe even your brother would be attracted to such a rare spectacle. The idea of your own flesh and blood paying money to ogle Winwin made you feel faintly sick, so you turned your body away from Winwin so he wouldn’t see the distress on your face.  
Yes, you would free him. You’d kill the old man if you had to do it, and live out the rest of your days as an outlaw, but your heart belonged to Winwin now and you would not allow it to be caged up alongside him.

Tonight was a good night for hunting it seemed, as you had been able to catch no less than five rabbits with strategically placed snares. Truthfully, you were sick of the taste of rabbit and if you could avoid it, you’d never eat it again, but it was this or starving to death. The old man didn’t seem to be in the mood to try and hunt for a deer or a boar, even if it meant that your stomachs were fuller and you could even carefully wrap the excess up in some cloth and carry it in your bag until the next mealtime.   
Making quick work of skinning the poor animals and propping them up to roast against a large stone you lugged over from within the forest, you disappeared again into the trees even though there wasn’t really a need to. 

You needed to come up with a plan to get Winwin away from the old man and back into freedom, whether it killed you or not. You knew that you wouldn’t be able to just yank the chains from the man and shout at Winwin to run, because the old man would surely clobber you so hard over the head for it you’d see stars. As well as that, you felt in your bones that you would have some difficulty convincing Winwin to leave at all, judging by the way that he seemed insistent on returning to his chains whenever he melted them off his wrists to join you with gathering food or whenever he felt like it, even. You still didn’t understand why he didn’t just go, just fly away and never look back. Whenever you asked him, he just shrugged, hummed, and changed the subject.

Perhaps even he didn’t know.

As you walked, muttering to yourself, your foot smashed painfully into something solid and you looked down, raising your leg up to clutch your poor toes and glaring at the rock that caused you harm as if it was animate. Your eyes drifted from it to another very similar one standing next to it, and then another, and then you noticed that they had all fallen from a clumsily built stone wall that span beyond what you could see.  
It was just a low wall, probably more designed to inform people wandering through the trees that the land beyond was owned by someone, but this part of the wall was broken. Feeling bad about leaving it behind like that, you scooped up the rock that you had smashed your foot against and placed it back on the wall, bringing the others with you until the wall looked whole again. Your toe really was beginning to throb painfully and you wondered how fast you were walking to cause yourself so much pain.

Then you wondered how far you had stormed from the camp and whether the rabbit was going to burn without you turning it every now and then.

You sighed, resting your weight against the wall for a few moments. It was beginning to get incredibly dark, and you couldn’t see the light from the fire peeking through the trees even as you turned to face the direction from which you had come, but you didn’t feel panicked. In a strange kind of way, sitting on the rocky wall made you feel more at ease than you had felt for a long time, and you wondered if you would ever bother to return to the camp.

What was the point? You wouldn’t be able to save Winwin, anyway. If he couldn’t be bothered to help himself, then why should you! It was all futile, and everything you would do anywhere but sitting on this wall would be entirely useless.

The sound of your name rolling off his tongue didn’t make you feel as good as it usually did, and the sight of him, his pale skin and fantastic wings stark against the gloom of the forest, failed to make your heart speed up. Rather, your entire body felt sluggish, as if your very energy was being drawn from you. “You always find yourself in bad situations.”  
“What?” you snapped, confused by his words. You were too tired to deal with him right now. You wanted him to leave you alone. “Go away.”  
“You are sat on a witches wall,” he said, ignoring your comment and merely crossing his arms, smirking down at you. “It would be best if you stood up.”  
You didn’t want to stand up. You wanted to sit here on this wall and keep the weight off your feet forever, witches and angels be damned.

He said your name sharply this time, his voice demanding attention. “I am being serious, you need to get up.”  
“I don’t want to.”  
“I know you don’t, that’s why you need to.”  
“How does that make sense?”   
“Just trust me.”  
“Why?”  
“By the gods,” he sighed. He stepped forwards and wrapped a hand around your upper arm. You were quick to try and shove him off, but he was too strong, and he tugged you up and off the wall before you could even right yourself. “There. Do you feel better?”

It was as if you’d just woken from a long nap. The irritated cloud that had settled over your mind dissipated and you were left staring at Winwin as if you’d never seen him before, and it was if you could feel the energy you had left in your body coursing through your veins.

“What the hell was that?” you barked, stumbling towards him and whirling to face the seemingly innocent wall.  
“I said, it is a witches wall. They sap your energy out of you and you are stuck there sitting on that wall until you starve, or worse.”  
“Really? A real witch built this?” You tried to look beyond the wall for the sign of any kind of house. You hadn’t thought that witches were even real, merely horror stories designed to make children fall in line, but now you were thoroughly spooked.   
“They build their walls all around to sustain their magic,” he told you, wrapping an arm around your shoulders and smiling brightly down at you where you were huddled against his chest. “We should get back to the camp before the old man notices that I am gone.”  
You nodded, blindly following after him and still slightly shaken from your strange ordeal with the wall. Now that you thought back, you had been unreasonably moody even in your own head. Scoffing in amazement, you wondered what else there was about the world you didn’t know about. Maybe Winwin knew about it all, being a scholar. He was obviously incredibly familiar with such things, saving you from first the wood elves and now this quietly malicious wall.

“Is there something on your mind?” he questioned when you could just see the flames of the fire through the trees. Your shoulders tensed and his fingers splayed over them, trying his best to massage the stiffness back out of them again.  
“No, not really,” you told him, the lie tasting like ash on your tongue. “I’m just nervous about going home is all.”  
“Are you sure?” he asked, placing a finger under your chin and raising your head so you could look nowhere but him. “You can tell me.”

Honestly, you wanted to cry. You wanted to cling to him and bury your face into his chest and refuse to let go of him, but he wouldn’t understand. No matter how many times you tried to make him see the reality of the situation he was in, he refused to understand why you were so upset about it. Did he not know that he wouldn’t be free anymore? Did he not realise that he wouldn’t be able to return home to his family, ever again?  
You had to do something. You had to.

You leaned up and pressed a gentle kiss against his mouth, making him move his hand up to cup your face.   
“I’m fine, Winwin,” you whispered, enjoying the way his eyes turned up at the corners as he smiled at you. “Everything’s perfect.”

It took another few days for you to finally arrive in your village. When you did, the atmosphere of unrest could be felt all the way to the church and back, and you tried your best to ignore the stares of the other villagers as they stopped and gawped at you and your unusual travelling companion. Winwin seemed to be just as fascinated with them as they were with him, staring back at them with equal curiosity and drinking in as much as your village as he possibly could, head spinning this way and that in order to take everything in and not miss a single thing.

You hoped he didn’t think too poorly of it, as shabby and run down as everything was.

You heard your name shouted across the town square when the old man had finally deemed it an acceptable spot to stop. You turned to face whoever it was that had called you and your heart soared at the sight of your friend, Johnny. His face was blackened with soot from the furnace and his apron was slightly more marked than it had been when you left, but he looked well, if you ignored the few extra burn scars he had acquired on his arms.

He was the blacksmith’s apprentice and he enjoyed his work, but he enjoyed his drink more, alongside the services of the women that worked in the tavern closest to his house. Even so, he was a steadfast and loyal friend, and those were hard to come by.

“What…” he was gaping at you, eyes flitting between yourself and Winwin, and you turned to face the angel with a nervous laugh.  
“Yeah, um… Long story?” you offered, scratching the back of your hand with your other.   
“Look away, boy,” the old man snarled at Johnny and whilst Johnny would usually never back down from confrontation, whether it was with an elder or not, the burning animosity in Winwin’s eyes was enough for him to lower his head and retreat. 

By now quite the crowd had gathered around the three of you, but you were too concerned with how Winwin was faring under all of this attention to even bother feeling self conscious for yourself. Even though you were probably caked in mud and you hadn’t bathed properly in two months, Winwin had never been around so many humans and they had never even gotten a glimpse of one of his kind before. You had no idea how they would react to him, other than staring.

Truthfully, you looked more terrified than he did; his shoulders were relaxed and he was comfortably making eye contact with everybody he looked at, even if they broke it and looked away first. You, on the other hand, were a mess. As the old man tacked his horse up outside the inn, you were shaking your knee as you willed him to move faster, and your fingers were trembling with adrenaline. If anybody made any kind of move towards Winwin, hostile or not, you were worried you would snap and have some kind of a breakdown. 

You just wanted him to be safe.

Before too long, the old man beckoned you both to follow him - as if Winwin had a choice - and you all disappeared into the inn. Mistress Elda was visibly startled by the three of you, or rather Winwin, but she readily accepted the gold the old man offered her and ushered you up the stairs and into one of the empty rooms available. The old man shut the door firmly behind you and locked it to keep any unsavoury folk out and you could finally feel yourself begin to relax slightly.

“Right,” the old man started and your hackles raised again. Here it was: here was the blow that would break your heart. Winwin obviously thought the same thing, and he shifted subconsciously closer towards you to, the muscles in his arms beginning to tense up. The veins of his forearms were bulging and you wondered whether he had been more freaked out by so many eyes on him than you had initially thought. “We’re headed upriver in the morning, so food and rest is in order. Girlie-” This was it, this was it, this was it. “You’re to stay here overnight with it; I have some business I need to attend to.”

Subconsciously, you were outraged at the way he referred to Winwin as ‘it’, as if he was just an inanimate toy he was coveting. However, you were too shocked by what the old man had asked of you and before you could even ask him to clarify, he had exited the room and was stumping down the stairs.

Before your mind could even wonder what the fuck, Winwin hands were on you, spinning you around to face him and drawing you into his chest. You latched onto him without even thinking anything of it, and you wondered how it had come to be that he was so comfortable with you that he was initiating physical contact like this. It had happened effectively overnight; one moment he was too angry and quiet to even look directly at you properly, and suddenly he was trying to feel your skin at every given opportunity. You didn’t know what had changed, but he was electrifying, so you couldn’t find it within yourself to particularly care.

“You are coming with us,” he said and you could hear the smile in his voice. “You are coming with me.”  
“Yeah,” you were laughing now, elation flooding your veins and making you feel almost giddy. “Yeah, I’m going with you.”  
“You are staying here?” he asked, tugging you away from him so he could lean down and look you in the eye. “With me?”  
“I guess so. That’s what the old man said, at least.”

His arms wound around you again and you remained in his arms, hearing the metallic thump as his chains hit the floor behind you and you heard nothing but the sound of his breathing and the beating of his heart, reminding you that he was real and he was right there with you.

It hadn’t been particularly easy to convince him it was safe for you to leave, even for just a few moments to go and get some food from Mistress Elda or one of the other barkeep, even if it was just bread and mead. You hadn’t tasted the sweet explosion of honey on your tongue for so long and you wondered if Winwin had anything like this back home, or if this was completely new for him.   
By forking out a few coins from the bottom of your pack before leaving Winwin alone in the room you were able to stretch Elda’s hospitality to providing two pheasant legs, basted in duck fat and served with leeks, carrots and potatoes. It was much more substantial and luxurious than anything you’d been able to rustle up on the journey, and your mouth was flooded with saliva before you even made it back up the stairs.  
You knocked on the door with your foot and Winwin pulled it open slowly, peeking just an eye out before opening it wider when he saw that it was you.

He looked impressed with the dinner, but decided after a few mouthfuls that he didn’t like leeks at all and so he moved them onto your plate, stealing one of your potatoes in exchange. As you ate it was mostly silent and when he had scraped his plate clean, he let out a content sigh and patted his stomach with satisfaction, drawing a laugh from you and another heartbreaking smile from him. 

“Are you excited to go to Greater Dawnstead?” he asked as you were lying side by side on the shabby rope bed. It was threadbare and provided little to no cushioning, but it was still a thousand times more comfortable than sleeping on the ground again and your bones were thanking you for the reprieve. He was playing with your fingers gently, his other arm under your head as you were using it as a pillow, tucked up into his chest.  
“No,” you answered honestly, heart dropping at the thought that you were delivering him to his fate and hadn’t yet done anything to prevent it. “Are you?”  
“No,” he told you, one of his fingers winding around three of yours, tugging them back and watching at they sprang back into place one by one as he released them. “If you are not, then I am not.”  
You were on the brink of grabbing him by the front of his clothes and shaking him, shouting at him that this was it, that he was going to be nothing more than a tourist attraction to those people, but your words failed you and your heart choked you. 

“We could leave,” you whispered into his torso. His hand was still dancing around yours, tangling your fingers together before untangling them. “We could just run away.”  
He hummed thoughtfully, before shaking his head and then planting a kiss in your hair. “I need to-” he stopped. Then, “I need to see.”  
“See what?” you asked, pulling your head away from him and staring up at his face. He didn’t look at you but his brow was heavy, troubled. “Greater Dawnstead? We can go in the night, see the sights, and then leave. Winwin,” you propped yourself up, turning his face towards you with one hand.   
“The old man would find us.” he said, eyes sad and mouth downturned.  
“I don’t care. We’ll run away again. We’ll run away until there’s no more land to run on, and then we’ll swim,” you were desperate now. “Please, let’s leave. Don’t make me watch him take you.”  
He sat up, hand coming up to cup the back of your head and rested his forehead against yours.   
“That’s not the life that you deserve.” he said, and you scoffed, pushing him away and creating more distance between you.  
“And this is the life that you deserve? Being locked up in a cage and paraded around like you’re an wild animal?”  
He slid forwards to hold onto you again, but you yanked yourself out of his grip and stood up off the bed so your mind wouldn’t become clouded with his sweet presence.  
“I was captured,” he said, and you winced at the reminder. “This is my punishment. I deserve this because I was arrogant, painfully so.”

You shook your head, turning away from him and staring sightlessly out the window. It was too grimy to see anything through it and for some reason, this only made you more infuriated.  
“My family wouldn’t be too happy to accept me back if they knew that I had…” he trailed off, his voice fading into nothing and you turned to look at him again, arms crossed firmly against your chest as if you were trying your hardest to protect your heart from any kind of damage he may cause.  
“That you had what?” you demanded.  
“Developed… feelings for a... human.”  
“Then you leave me behind,” you answered, chin raised defiantly. “If it’s what keeps you safe, then you leave me behind.”

He was up on his feet before you could even see him move, his face suddenly incredibly close to yours and hands clasped so firmly on your cheeks it was almost a threat.  
“I will never.” he stated, voice like thunder and the meaning of his words striking through you like a white hot blade. 

You hadn’t realised just how quickly the two of you had come together, and even though you had only known each other for a short part of your lives, you already knew he had become a defining factor on the rest of your life. You hoped that he thought the same.

His hands were entwined in your hair, his forehead pressed against yours, but you couldn’t look him in the eyes. You were afraid he would see into your soul, your heart, and then he would know that you were embarrassingly weak for him. 

You tugged away, sighing heavily at the loss of contact, and declared, “I’m taking a bath,” you said, gesturing to the iron tub in front of the fire that was making your skin feel sticky in the small room. “I’m going to ask Mistress Elda for a bucket or two. You just… You just stay here.”

You felt his heavy gaze on the back of your head even after you shut the door behind yourself, and plodded heavily down the stairs and back to the bar.   
For a few more coins, Elda was happy to supply you with five pails of water, calling the cook’s son to help you lug them back upstairs. 

Your muscles were still lean and firm from your labour based job, so you had no problem with carrying two buckets in each hand. The boy was waif thin and drawn looking, so you felt bad for making him lift something heavy, promising him a silver for his services.   
Opening the door with your foot and setting the buckets on the floor in front of the fire, you turned to relinquish the child of his burden - dismayed at his shocked and wide eyes as he took in the figure perched on the bed and staring at him in equal fascination.

“Leave, now, child - return to your other duties,” you said, taking the bucket from his hand and pressing a coin into it, folding his fingers over the metal and pushing him back towards the door. “Tell nobody of what you’ve seen, understand?”  
He nodded dumbly, still staring at Winwin with awe, his gaze only being broken by the door you shut gently in his face.

“Human children are quite open with their expressions,” Winwin commented, and you nodded, turning to the bathtub without even glancing at him. “You are angry with me.”  
“That boy’s sweet, but gormless.” You didn’t answer his observation, busying yourself with pouring the water into the iron tub.

You knew that most people would prefer to hang their pails of water above the fire to warm the water, but ever since you were little, you had preferred to submerge yourself in cold water. It was invigorating and refreshing, and made your muscles loosen up before going to bed. That way, the ache didn’t last as long and you could continue working as hard as you could for the Jacobsens.

You would have to visit them before you ventured on to Greater Dawnstead.

You toed off your leather boots, grimacing at the sight of your grimy and sore feet, then shirked your jacket onto the floor. Modesty overcame you before you could undress further, and you spoke to the room, “close your eyes.”  
Turning briefly to check that he had done as you said, you untucked the fabric of your tunic from your breeches and pulled it up and over your head. Unlacing your breeches, those were quick to drop to the floor too and you dipped a toe into the cold water, letting your body adjust as you slowly slipped into the water and sank down to sit.

It was a little colder than you were used to due to the freezing weather, but you immediately began to unwind and relax, hardly caring that Winwin was barely four feet from where your naked body was, and scrubbing roughly at your body to get the worst of the mud and general grime off yourself.  
When you deemed yourself clean enough, you relaxed back onto the side of the tub and released a loud and long sigh.

You had spent longer than two months wandering into the forest, further than anybody you knew had ever travelled, but you didn’t feel different. You didn’t feel smarter, or more experienced, or that you actually had travelled as far as you had. All you had to commemorate your journey were the calluses on your feet and the weight that you had lost from your stomach and thighs. Was it supposed to be like this? Weren’t you supposed to return in glory, with stories to share, like those knights in the books your father would read?  
No tales of glory and splendour were floating to the front of your mind. Your experiences would stay your yours, kept inside your memories like a treasure nobody would be able to plunder.

He was most likely watching now, his eyes wide open, but yours were firmly closed. You didn’t think that you were angry at him, not really.

You were just frustrated.

How could he possibly think like this? To think that, just because he was captured, this was some sick way of being punished for his mistake? To atone? You didn’t understand, and you wouldn’t understand no matter how many times he tried to explain to you. It didn’t make any sense.

“Y/N.” He whispered, and the proximity of his voice made you jump, the water shifting around you. He was kneeling next to the tub, staring into your eyes with such intensity that you’d feel naked even if you currently weren’t. Instinctively, your legs closed together and your arm raised to hide your breasts - before his hand caught yours. “You are so beautiful.”  
He brought his face closed, gliding his lips up your jawline and making your head tilt back and release a sigh.   
“So beautiful.” he whispered again, making goosebumps raise against the flesh of your entire body and you tensed slightly as he brought his hand lower, only to rest it on your hip under the water and tug you slightly closer to the side of the tub he was leaning on.

His fingers smoothed out on your flesh, and he brought your mouth to his in a gentle kiss. It was sweet until you remembered your previous exasperation, and you sank your teeth into his bottom lip roughly. He jerked away in shock, tongue peeking out and wetting his lip and staring at you, but you just shrugged and smiled innocently, bringing your knees up to your chest defensively. 

He was on his feet in a second, hands hooking under your knees and holding onto your back, and quicker than you could blink he had hauled you out of the protection of the water and was cradling your naked body to his chest.  
“By the Gods-!” you exclaimed, clinging closer to him as the ground disappeared from under you, and your cheeks flamed red as your entire body was revealed to him.

He said nothing, turning to the bed and dropping you ungracefully onto it, and you scrambled pathetically to try and cover as much of yourself with your hands as you could. It proved to be fruitless, however, and Winwin’s eyes still roamed your entire form with greedy eyes.  
You had never been so embarrassed in your entire life.

“Winwin, what the hell!” you demanded, hands still scrabbling around on your body. 

His form crawled up the bed, his entire body weight resting carefully on top of yours and you stopped breathing again. His lips were dancing across your neck, hands supporting himself on either side of your body, and his teeth were grazing your flesh so suddenly that you inhaled jerkily, anticipating - though you weren’t sure what for.

He said nothing, just fluttering little kisses up your neck before nipping gently, pulling your skin into his mouth and sucking languidly. A gasp was torn from your throat, your hands shooting up to knot in his hair and hold his head close to your skin. Darker and darker bruises bloomed up the column of your throat and by the time he was done, you were gasping for breath and a devilish smirk had graced his face as he stared down at your form below him.

“Are you okay?” he asked, and the innocence in his tone of voice aggravated you. He looked smug, and you wanted nothing more than to wipe that look off his face.  
Shoving him backwards and taking a little joy from the surprise on his face, you pressed him back into the mattress where you lay and straddled his hips, pressing your lips hurriedly to his. It was messy, with too much tongue and teeth and biting and gasps for air, and your hands were exploring his firm torso with glee, memorising the long planes of his body but wishing for skin to skin contact. 

He obviously thought the same thing, pushing you back slightly to yank his tunic up and off his head, slinging it somewhere into the room behind you before reconnecting your mouths again. You dragged your hands slowly down the smooth, taut skin of his torso, down to his abdomen and back up again, flicking a nail across one of his nipples and drawing a gasp from him. His muscles flexed underneath you and he angled his head, his tongue delving further into your mouth and wrestling with your own as your hands blindly attempted to unlace his trousers.

You were taking too long, so his hands halted you, bringing your hands back up to rest on his chest to brace yourself as he sat up, burying his face in your chest and sucking your right nipple into his mouth. He swirled his tongue around it, coaxing it into a hardened bud, and you arched your back, moaning wantonly into the small room as he nipped at your breast and tugged the other with his free hand, his eyes focused on all of the expressions your face made.

You had never been in a situation like this with another man, but something about Winwin made you feel safe. You were confident that this was right; that this felt right.

The wetness between your legs was beginning to pool and soak into the fabric of his trousers and you shamelessly ground your crotch into his, making him stutter in his rhythm and moan against your breast, pausing in his ministrations as you started grinding steadily over his hardening length. You could feel the heat of it through the fabric of his trousers and the friction that pulled against your clit made you gasp, your eyes screwing shut as his hands gripped onto your hips and aided you as you ground against him, a deep groan coming from somewhere low in his throat. 

“Y/N,” he whispered, eyes shining as he took in your features and how they all screamed for him. “Y/N.”  
All he could say was your name, not knowing the correct words in the tongue you spoke to properly tell you how you made him feel; the pleasures of the flesh alongside the warmth that encompassed him whenever you were near.

He was convinced there was nothing more beautiful than the sight of you above him, sweating and panting his name over and over again.

Your hands dropped down to his trousers again, fumbling at the strings and sighing in frustration when you failed again. Chuckling at your exasperation, he made quick work of them with one hand and you were quick to shove them down, with him lifting himself slightly so you could free him of his trousers entirely.   
You knew that your eyes were wide as you took him in. You had never seen a bare man before, always being careful to avoid accidentally looking when you would venture into the river and swim with some of your friends. Despite this, you knew that he was as blessed as the rest of him, and when you returned your gaze up to his and saw his smug smile, you grinned.

His hand gripped the base of his length, pumping himself once and then twice, and then you were pushed over onto your back again. You landed heavily, hair splaying around your face, and all you could do was stare at the ceiling as his fingertips met your entrance, feeling the wetness that had gathered there.   
His fingertips glided up and down your clit, making your hips buck up towards him as a whiny moan left your mouth, sparks and electricity shocking your body and making you curl your toes.

If you had your way, you would be doing this all the time.

“I do not think that I can wait any longer,” he told you, his voice uncharacteristically hoarse and shaky. You nearly cried with relief at his words. “May I?”  
“For the love of- Yes!” you exclaimed, head raised to look at him.

You had never seen anything as glorious as Winwin kneeling between your legs, hand wrapped firmly around himself. 

He shifted slightly closer to you, pulling your legs slightly further apart to accommodate him.  
“If I cause you any discomfort, you must tell me immediately.” He sounded solemn and you nodded immediately, eyes rolling back into your head when his length met your entrance and he slid it up to your clit and back down, coating himself in your juices.   
“Winwin…” you gasped, your walls clenching around nothing and your teeth gritting together. “Please…” 

Slowly, agonisingly slowly, he sank inside you, inch by inch as your head lolled back and legs started shaking. You held your breath at the sharp ache, the throbbing, and nearly wept as he bottomed out inside you, stilling completely and hands reaching up to grip onto yours. Your fingers were laced and you were clinging on tightly as you could, his lips dusting kisses up and around your chest, murmuring words in a language you didn’t recognise but soothed you all the same.

Never in your life had you ever felt so full, so complete, and you were already dreading the moment morning arrived and you were forced to separate.

“Can I…?” he left the question open, jerking his hips slightly and you gasped at the sensation of his length kissing something deep inside you, nodding your head frantically.  
He raised up, his hands moving to grip onto your hips, and slid himself out before slowly inching back inside again. Your eyes were screwed shut, head tilted back onto the pillow and your mouth releasing a cacophony of moans that you’d usually be embarrassed about. He repeated his actions again and again and again, sliding in and out of you at a gradually quickening pace that stole the very air from your lungs. 

To you, nothing else existed. Outside of this room, the world had stopped turning and everything was frozen in time as Winwin made love to you, swallowing your gasps and moans with his mouth pressed sweetly against yours, sweat beading at his temple and grunts leaving his throat.  
He drove into you harder and harder, a hand coming up to clutch at the flesh of your breast, and you were convinced - no, you were certain that he truly was an angel. To be with him like this, to be encompassed in his arms as he murmured sweet nothings in your ear, the sensation of your walls clamping down on him tightly as your erupted around him, muscles spasming and a loud cry being torn from you, was to receive a glimpse of heaven. 

He was moving faster and faster, his fingers digging into any part of you he could reach, leaving red marks on your hips, your arms, your breasts, your legs. His head dropped into your neck, bringing your flesh into his mouth again and sinking his teeth into it as he stilled, filling you with his seed as his muscles trembled and he choked a moan into your neck.

Your hands were carding through his hair, your walls throbbing around him as he emptied himself inside you, and when he was done he slid his softening length from you and planted a sweet kiss on your lips. 

“Do you feel okay?” He asked breathlessly, chest heaving and face slightly flushed. He was sitting back on his knees now, staring down at you with eyes filled with something you hadn’t seen before and blood rushed to your cheeks, legs clamping shut and pulling your weight up so you could face him properly.  
“I feel…” you stopped, taking in the marks that littered your body and the sight of your mixed juices leaking from your womanhood. Adrenaline was still making your fingers shake slightly, your heart hammering in your chest, and you grinned up at him who smiled gently in return. “I feel perfect.”

Just before the sun broke over the mountains, he was sleeping soundly on your chest, your fingers stroking rhymically through his hair. He had never looked sweeter, his cheek slightly squashed into your chest and lips plump. He was glowing, and you swore that by now you had everything about him memorised, even each individual hair of his eyebrows. 

The sun was up, and with it came the crushing realisation that you would not be able to wake up with Winwin in your arms again. 

The thought of it brought tears to your eyes and you desperately tried to blink them back, but then your chest felt tight and your breathing was heavy, and Winwin was blinking sleepily up at you with the stars in his eyes and they were dribbling down your face.

“You are crying,” he said, pulling away from you slightly to rub his eyes with the palm of his hand. More tears fell down your face at the very thought that something so sweet was going to end up living such a sad life, and Winwin’s hands were cupping your cheeks in the next instant. “Why are you crying?”  
You didn’t say anything, just staring at him through your blurred vision. What could you say, though? He was adamant that he would do this, even as much as you tried to resist him. You didn’t think he would be changing his mind any time soon.

“Y/N.” He was smoothing his thumbs over your cheeks, trying desperately to wipe your tears away, but they kept coming. You didn’t want to say goodbye to him when the old man came to get you. You didn’t want to let go of him.

At this point you were afraid that it would kill you.

“This will not be the last time we will be together,” he said, pulling your body upwards so you were held tightly against his chest. The nip in the air made you shiver and burrow closer to him, his body warmth keeping you snug, and he tucked your head into his neck so he could rest his head on top of yours. “I will make sure of that.”  
“How, Winwin?” You asked, sniffling and wishing you had a handle on your emotions. “How will you do that?”  
“I will find a way,” he said, his voice firm and leaving no room for argument. “I will find my way back to you.”

The early morning was spent like that, cuddled up into his chest as he sang softly what he told you was a lullaby his mother used to sing to him when he was restless and couldn’t sleep. It worked, for the most part - until you remembered that you might not hear his singing voice again, and you dissolved into tears once more.   
The old man came for you both when the inn downstairs started to wake up, Mistress Elda crowing through the building and demanding all her staff wake up. One by one they tramped down the stairs, and you were still clinging to Winwin and terrified of the moment the old man’s heavy fist would land once, twice, three times on the wooden door that separated you and Winwin from your inevitable fate.

Winwin stood up first, heading to the door as you frantically pulled on some clothes and then leapt back into bed, and the old man entered the room, his form seeming imposing despite Winwin’s superior height and stature. Before you could even think about, the chains snaked around Winwin’s wrists like they’d always been there and the old man barely glanced in your direction.

“You have two minutes to right yourself, girlie, then we’re setting off.”  
“I was wondering if, before we left…” your voice died slightly when the old man turned to look at you with a glare of fire. The thought of the Jacobsen’s hearing that you had returned to your village but not going to see them made your heart feel sick with guilt, so you pushed on despite your subconscious screaming at you to do as the old man asked. “I was wondering if I could visit some people. Just quickly, for like five minutes or so.”  
The old man was instant in his reply.

“This isn’t a touring group, girlie. You’re coming now or you’re not coming at all.”  
That was not the reply you wanted to hear, and Winwin’s dark glare at the side of the old man’s face did nothing to alleviate your sadness. You hoped that Mrs Jacobsen wasn’t upset with you when you returned. You would make sure that you made it up to her when you got back.

Two minutes later the three of you had left the inn, your head down and your heart somewhere near your ankles. It felt rather like you were headed towards the executioner's block, and your feet were dragging behind you in your own little show of defiance. Maybe if you lagged behind far enough the old man would get frustrated with you, and you could buy Winwin some time to escape.

Glancing at him and the way that he was walking straight ahead with his head high as if he was proud of the fate that awaited him made you think that he wouldn’t take your few moments even if you handed them to him on a silver platter.

You didn’t know too much about his people and the way that they lived, just little bits from what Winwin had told you, but their ideas of pride and atonement were completely fucked.

He didn’t turn to look at you once as you made your way out of the town square, ignoring all of the bleary eyed and awed people that walked past. Travellers from other cities and villages, mothers that gathered their flocks of children into their skirts. Carts drawn by oxen and donkeys trundled past, hay stacked up and children sitting up on them, gawping at Winwin as they rode past.   
The smells of spices and baked goods drifted towards you on the breeze, and you couldn’t help but inhale deeply and feel saliva explode over your tongue. You had lived in this village for your entire life, but you never failed to get more and more excited with each step you took towards the market. Even if all you bought were the bare essentials, sometimes being able to barter for cheap meat such as chicken or even a pheasant from farmers that ran their own stalls, you enjoyed the presence of being in such a lively and happy place.  
You loved your little village, even if it was small and poor.

The road to Greater Dawnstead was thankfully short, only about two miles of walking before arriving at the stone walls that separated it from the outside world. The portcullis gate was up, allowing citizens and travellers to pass through freely, and as more and more people swarmed around you to get on with their days, you found that less people stared at Winwin. There were, of course, the hissed whispers between friends and the gasps as they realised what was among them, but then their eyes would find the chains that bound Winwin and they would avert their eyes.

The skin on the back of your neck was beginning to become itchy with the stress of the situation and you wondered vaguely whether it would be easier to say goodbye now rather than watch him get ripped away from you. 

Passing through the portcullis gate, you were jarred at how different the city was from your own little hamlet. The streets were paved with stone, houses made of the same material and they all even had glass windows. Little alleyways and winding pathways led off from the main street that you were all following, and the insatiable curiosity to know what was on the other end almost overwhelmed you.   
Neat flower beds lined the streets, attractive arrangements of flowers in stone boxes rising from the floor, and you knew that no expense was spared when it came to this city; this hub of trade and leisure.  
It made you wonder what the lord of this city was doing about the starving children in the harshest winters your little defenceless village saw whilst these people were hiding in their stone houses and thanking their deities it wasn’t them out there. Your stomach was twisting uncomfortably at the thought.

As you walked, the houses became bigger and greater, becoming shops selling all kinds of fineries. An entire shop devoted to different kinds of silks baffled you, and you were close to turning back and leaving this foreign place. Was a shop selling only shoes necessary? These people lived in the lap of luxury and it made you feel physically nauseous that you could hardly afford to keep a single roomed house in your name.   
Greater Dawnstead had many of the same travellers as Lower Dawnstead, the same wooden carts being pulled by struggling animals, but you were surrounded by rich and the well known, dressing themselves in silks and jewels, hopping over puddles like flapping geese to protect their fineries. To walk amongst these people made you feel ill, but you wouldn’t leave Winwin to walk alone in a place that was completely new and unusual to him.

He had maintained the stoic image you had gotten to know well when you first met, but now you could see that his shoulders were visibly tensed and he was trying his best to make himself shrink into something less noticeable, to no avail. He still attracted attention, as was expected with his superior stature and gargantuan wings, but no questions were asked of either you or the old man, each of them averting their eyes as if you were the walking dead or they had committed a misdeed against you. 

The way that the roads cleared around you like the red sea made you nervous, a building pressure rising in your chest that you had to swallow down in order to avoid crying out. You had never felt this unsafe anywhere in the wilds you had just come from, even sleeping surrounded by the darkness and unknowable depths of the forest. There was something about the people that were moving around you and refusing to make eye contact that made you feel sick.

These were the kinds of people that had caused Winwin’s race to scatter and go into hiding in the first place. These were the kinds of people that would buy his wings, severed from his body, without a second thought about the person they came from. 

The gilded streets you had heard so much about seemed so evil to you; an unguessable danger lurked in every corner, and if you didn’t keep thinking of how scared Winwin was you’d have turned and pelted back down the street and all the way to the safety of your little home. As it was, you set your shoulders and grit your teeth, glaring at anybody who ventured a little too close to you for comfort and wishing you were back in the dingy little inn you had spent the night with Winwin in.

At least there you didn’t feel the looming threat that something awful was going to happen.

By the time you made it to the main square far in the middle of the sprawling city, the crowds had gotten thicker and it was a struggle to keep close to the pair of them without being jostled and shoved to one side. The noise was deafening, the shouts and the jeers at nothing in particular ringing in your ears and for the first time, you desperately missed the peace and quiet you got far on the other side of the mountains.   
You missed the sounds of the birds in the morning and the steady beat of Winwin’s heart when you laid your head on his chest. You missed the freedom of being able to splash around in the rushing brooks you passed, flinging water at an outraged Winwin and ensuing a furious water fight that nobody seemed to really win, collapsing in a heap of exhilarated laughter on the bank.

You missed Winwin. He was right in front of you but at the same time, he had already been ripped from you.

The town square was much grander than anything you had in your small hamlet, lined with shops and graced with a huge water feature that looked like something out of your dreams. Three beautiful women were standing in a circle with their backs to each other, contorting their bodies in graceful ways and arched, water pouring from their fingertips in an arc that pooled at their feet.   
You were enraptured, keeping your eyes on the stone ones of the closest woman, but as you got closer and closer a sickly feeling of dread washed over you.

These were not women.

The pointed tips of their ears gave away their race, and the happy, laughing faces suddenly contorted into shrieks of horror, severed stumps protruding from their backs parallel from each other on their shoulder blades. Eyes scanning wildly - searching for reason, or at least an explanation for this vulgar display of power - you couldn’t help but focus on the shackles that encased their feet, chaining them down into this stone structure that had originally seemed so beautiful to you.   
Winwin wasn’t looking at it.

This was a sick place.

“You are late, Godfrey.” a gruff, heavy voice startled you out of your internal revulsion, and you turned, dismayed to find a man in steel armour with the crown’s emblem emblazoned onto his ailette. The craftsmanship that went into each and every stitch of his ailette astounded you, but the way the sun glinted off the steel that flexed over his hand, clasped firmly - yet somehow still seeming relaxed - over the hilt of his sword that rested in his sheath made your breath stutter in your throat and you knew that you could never trust this man.  
“There was a delay,” the old man said, his voice less stern than it usually was, and oddly shaky. You were perturbed.  
“No matter. You are here now,” the man’s eagle eyes zeroed in on Winwin from his perch on a stallion, and you had to physically restrain yourself from flinging yourself in front of him to shield him from view. “This is the specimen, I presume?”  
“Yes. We caught him in the forests of Tay, in the North, my lord.”  
“We?”  
The old man turned to you, gesturing you forwards wildly and suddenly you were also under the scrutiny of the man that had managed to demand respect from the most stubborn man you had ever met.

You were fully dressed, wrapped in your warmest coat, but under his stare you felt terribly naked, as if he could see right through to your heart and your soul. 

“There was a complication.” the old man, Godfrey, added.   
“I can see,” the man in armour said. “It matters little. Take it.”

At his words, there was a surge of activity that surprised you, men dressed in a similar rich fashion emerging from the crowds around you and clasping their metal hands around Winwin’s arms.

You were indignant, surging forwards only to be grasped equally as roughly and shaken slightly, but you didn’t cease the cries that escaped your lips at the sight of a woven bag being shoved over Winwin’s head and obscuring him from your view.   
“Let go of him! You bastards, he’s defenceless!” you shrieked, attracting the attention of the people around you.

The man above you, obviously in a superior position of power, rolled his eyes as if you were little above a pesky fly. 

“Take the girl, too. Best to erase a problem before it grows and gets worse,” he said monotonously, as if he were merely dictating the weather. “She already knows far too much for my liking.”

You shouted and cried out, but not a single person seemed to hear you or they were determined to ignore what was happening. Hands dug into the flesh of your upper arms, restraining you completely, and another bag was shoved over your head, quieting you and making the hot air you screamed out make the bag become stifling. 

“My lord… There is the matter of my payment…” the old man was saying, and you could have hurled curses at him. What a yellow bellied snake! He had misled you this entire time!  
“Payment, Godfrey?” the man - this lord - was drawling as you were shoved forwards, being lifted and placed onto a horse. You couldn’t even search in front of you with your hands to find something to cling onto in order to maintain your balance, your arms still being gripped by a man on the horse behind you, tugging them slightly back.

Your shoulders were burning at the uncomfortable position you were in, and you were entirely bewildered by this sudden turn of events but far too concerned for Winwin’s well being instead of your own.  
You knew that he wouldn’t say a single word in front of them, but a huge part of you wanted to scream out for him just to get some kind of reply that would tell you that he was okay. That he was unharmed.

Before you knew it, the horse you were perched on took off at a canter and you were on your way to somewhere unknowable. At this point you were completely disorientated so you couldn’t even guess where it was they were taking you, but you had a pretty good idea that it was going to be somewhere unpleasant.  
All you could hear were the gruff voices that were too muffled for you to make at individual words, and the sound of the itchy material of the sack over your head scratching against your head. With any kind of luck, the journey would be over shortly and this absurd thing would be taken off your head so you could breathe some kind of fresh air.

You did not get that opportunity.

As soon as your feet met solid ground again, you were swathed in the most putrid stench you had ever smelled in your entire life. You worked on a farm and this made your stomach churn and bile raise in your oesophagus.   
You were forced forwards by the man that was holding onto your upper arm, your body turned slightly to the side to try and accommodate his height. He was far taller than you, and was seemingly unwilling to relax even a little bit if it meant that your feet could be planted firmly on the ground. Instead, you were half dragged across the flagstone floor, still completely unaware of your surroundings, but judging from the moisture of the air around you and the jeers and shouts coming from all sides, you were definitely in some kind of a prison.

Your heart was beating uncomfortably hard in your throat at the sudden situation you found yourself in. You weren’t entirely certain of your crimes but whatever they were, surely you could be let go soon. Lower Dawnstead was calling your name and if it wasn’t for the overwhelming affection you had for Winwin, you’d be pleading with them to let you go so you could return to your tiny world.  
All of this would be forgotten if it weren’t for Winwin.

“Here we are, little lady,” the voice slightly above you said, yanking the sack off your head and shoving you slightly forwards into the cell. It was completely bare of everything, including a bed or even somewhere you could relieve yourself, and it was dark and suspiciously moist. It was everything you had heard about the prisons under the beautiful city, of the disease and pestilence, but you were still startled and bewildered. 

Winwin was nowhere to be found.

The heavy iron doors clanged shut behind you, dragged close by the soldier that brought you down here, and you scrambled over to the bars, clinging onto them.

“Please,” you pleaded, catching his attention momentarily. There was nothing particularly defining about his face. You supposed that in a past life you would have found him somewhat handsome, but Winwin was the only person you could think of. “Where are you taking him?”  
“Him?” the soldier barked a laugh. “The beast? Got you hooked, has it?”  
“Please, I just need to know if he’s okay.”  
“You’re naive, little lady. You’re a bloody fool if you think that creature is asking anything about you.”

You rolled your eyes. “With all due respect, sir, I don’t think any of you are worthy of him speaking to you.”

The man’s face contorted, slamming a steel clad hand against the metal of your cage, the resounding noise shocking you and sending you stumbling backwards.   
“I’d watch your smart mouth if I were you, little girl. It’ll be your precious creature that suffers the consequences for it.”

You could do little more than glare hotly at him, his smug smirk sending fury shooting down your veins, but if what he said was true then you could do nothing about it. If you could do nothing else, you would keep him safe.

The soldier left, and you rested your forehead against the bars of your cell. Thankfully the two cells on either side you were empty, but the voices that called to you from in front and all around were distracting and threatening.   
You had nothing to do but sit against the stone wall on the far side of your cell, letting the cold sink into your flesh and bones. Before long, you were too stiff to do anything other than play with your fingers the same way that Winwin had that morning, and pray to whatever gods that were listening to protect him.

*

The sun fell after what felt like several days, the bars leading to the outside world preventing you from feeling the last tendrils of warmth from the day. It got significantly cooler and goosebumps broke out over your skin, not even huddling closer into yourself being something that could preserve your body heat.   
You hadn’t moved very far from the position you had been sat in since you first sat down, standing up once in order to shake out the cramp that built in your thighs, but there was no movement from your part. Nobody had been to deliver you any food, skipping your cell when they brought the rations to the other prisoners. 

You supposed that they had all been in here a lot longer than you, judging from their manic looks and filthy skin. It had not been that long that you had last eaten a proper meal anyway, so the others most likely needed the food more than you did.

In the distance you could hear the bells of the cathedral tolling for every hour that passed and it seemed that the longer you sat there are stared at the loose flagstone in the floor of your cell, the longer it took for the next hour to pass. By the time the sun rose again, you were frozen stiff to the floor and there were no signs of anybody coming to speak to you anytime soon.

You wondered vaguely where your brother was.

Food had been distributed to the other prisoners and with it came another soldier you didn’t recognise, leading the way for the Lord of wherever and he peered into your cell, glancing around in a way that made you instantly raise your hackles in alarm.

“No need to look so offended, girl, I’m just here to get some things straight,” His voice dripped with contempt and his nose was wrinkled with disgust at the scent that you still hadn’t gotten used to. It was too… Much. “I also have some questions about the creature you arrived here with.”  
“I’m not telling you anything.”  
“You will be quick to change your opinion.”

The Lord turned to give a quick nod to the other soldier, who nodded in return and then left you completely alone with this man. Your cell door was wide open but you’d be stupid if you tried to get past this man, his hand resting lackadaisical on the hilt of his sword. He wasn’t doing anything to harm you directly, but the threat was there.

“I’ll tell you again. I’m going to ask you a few questions about that beast, and you’re going to tell me everything you know.”  
You stayed silent, staring up at the middle aged man. 

He must have been around the same age that your father was when he died, but there was a lack of warmth in his eyes that you had loved in your fathers. There were no visible scars or battle wounds but the man carried himself with an air that suggested he had lived a violent and weary life. Again you were reminded that you couldn’t trust this man as far as you could throw him.

“What is its name?”  
“I don’t know.”

You heard it before you felt it. The floor met your head with a resounding crack that caused you to cry out, and the exploding pain that erupted across the other side of your face told you that the man had backhanded you with his armoured hand.  
If you were lucky, you would only be moderately bruised and you would manage to keep all of your teeth.

“Wrong answer, girl. What is its name?”  
“I don’t know.” You kept your voice flat, completely even with not even a slight waver despite the overwhelming throbbing agony in your entire head. “You think he would have told me?”  
The man was silent, his jaw set and flexing, but seemed to accept your words.

“Where did it come from? Where are the others?”  
“I don’t know.”

Another smack was landed across your face and you felt the blood burst into your mouth. A split lip. 

“Where did it come from?”  
“I still don’t know.”  
“You’re wasting your time protecting it, girl. It’ll sell you out the moment it got the opportunity.”

Your thoughts were becoming hazier with each blow that the man delivered to your face, and articulation was difficult with your lips swollen and bleeding. 

“What is he doing in Greater Dawnstead?”  
“I don’t know.”

He leaned down to seize you by your throat, slamming you backwards into the stone wall and snarling into your face. You were dangling pathetically, clutching onto his metal arms, but you wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of making a single noise to show how much pain you were in.  
He’d have to tear the cries from your dead body.

“Don’t lie to me, girl,” he spat. “You arrived at the same time. You arrived together. You know what he’s doing here, and you know why Godfrey brought him here.”  
“I just told you, old man,” you hissed through your bleeding lips. “My memory is hazy.”

He dropped your body to the stone floor and you landed in a heap, gasping for air and massaging your throat in vain. The feel of his fingers digging into your flesh wasn’t going away no matter how hard you tried to massage the sensation out from under your skin.   
Before you could even get your breath back, his hand was fisted in your hair and he had yanked your head back, exposing your neck, and bringing his face uncomfortably close to yours again.

“You can act as tough as you want, Y/N, but you’re only going to make things worse for yourself.”

He released you and you slumped back down, rolling onto your back and staring up at the ceiling. It was far too dark for you to see anything, but staring at nothing brought an odd kind of calmness over you.

“I look forward to it, whatever your name is.”

You didn’t want to know how he knew what your name was. You didn’t want to know. You refused to know.

He spat on the floor somewhere near you and left your cell, dragging the door shut and slamming it closed, making a show of locking and laughing as he walked away down the hall.

In hushed whispers and drunken slurs, you had heard of the brutality of the guards in the prisons of Greater Dawnstead but to experience it first hand was startling. You couldn’t even bring yourself to be angry about it, and you wore your resilience and protectiveness like a shield.

As long as they kept probing you about Winwin rather than suggesting he wasn’t alive anymore, you would be fine. They’d have to kill you before you let anything he had trusted you with go.

As you gingerly raised a hand to feel your face and the strange shape it had formed from the swelling, you wondered if that was their plan.

*

The sun set and rose again, like always, and you were convinced that you were going to die of boredom before anything else could kill you. Listening to the conversations of your fellow prisoners was becoming monotonous and gradually their voices faded into little above white noise.  
You were bored beyond belief, your stomach was achingly empty, and you found that you were asleep for as long as you could be just for something to do that didn’t involve you sitting and staring into nothing.

This day was the same as the last, with the Lord of somewhere you weren’t aware of trying to beat as much information out of you as he physically could. He was unsuccessful, of course; your lips were entirely sealed and at this point, you were sure they would stay like that until you died on this disgusting stone floor.

On what you think was the fourth day of this, your cell door was dragged open and a young woman you had never seen before entered, crouched down next to your motionless form and pressed her fingers against the underside of your jaw. When she confirmed that you were, in fact, alive, she pressed a bowl of water to your lips and you barely had the energy to prevent yourself from drowning. The water was the most heavenly thing you had ever tasted and all you could wonder was whether Winwin was being fed or if he was suffering the same way you were.

Not for the last time, you wondered who would tell your brother that you had died in the prisons under the city he lived in.

Only a few more days passed when something out of the ordinary happened again. The moon was high in the sky and you could just about see it from your slumped position against the wall. You were convinced that your bones had set into position, too sore and stiff for you to move at all and you knew that you had broken some ribs, perhaps you skull and your collarbone. The pain had dulled into an angry throbbing, and you were becoming more and more used to it. You didn’t even have the energy to return a quip to the Lord when he demanded all sorts of information from you, and each day, when you peeled your bruised eyelids open you were shocked that your heart hadn’t stopped beating yet.

A small part of you that you were trying your best to ignore wished that you would hurry up and die already.

 

It was nighttime, and you weren’t expecting it when your cell door was dragged open again and two soldiers came rushing in.

You were lifted up onto your feet, a bag made of the same rough material as the one that you had been brought here wearing shoved over your head. All of your body weight had to be carried by the two men clutching onto your upper arms, and they were murmuring words to each other that you couldn’t be bothered to focus on. 

In the back of your mind, there were distant alarm bells, but you didn’t have the strength to fight against the two men. They were taking you somewhere with surprising speed and you wondered what the urgency was. Maybe the Lord decided that nighttime meetings added to the ambiance of the situation as he tried to cave your skull in.

Who would tell the Jacobsens? What would happen to your home?

“We’re going to get into trouble for this,” were the first words you heard when the bag was ripped off your head, some of your hair going with it. 

Who was going to tell your brother?

“You heard the man. Knight Captain is on a murderous rampage and we have to get it over and done with.”  
“Then the Knight Captain will string us up by our fucking entrails. Bloody hell, a midnight lynching? What is Lord Godalming thinking?”

Who was going to tell your friends? Lucas with his eyes full of stars for the baker’s daughter, Johnny with his fiery passion and strong arms perfect for hugging when the going gets tough, or even Mistress Elda with her stern face but with a heart of gold?

 

“I don’t give a shit. Asking questions isn’t what gets me my gold at the end of the week, is it? Hurry up, man, and then we’ll deal with the Knight Captain when he gets here.”

“What’s happening?” you managed to murmur, feeling your hands being drawn behind you and laced together quickly and efficiently with rope. The bondings were uncomfortably tight. “That hurts…”

Who would tend to your parents graves, weeding and laying flesh flowers each week? 

 

“Jesus, man, look at her! What could she have done? She’s completely harmless.”  
“What did I just say? Has your brain been replaced with cow dung? Get a bloody move on.”

It was silent then, and one of the soldiers pulled you gently forward. You weren’t sure when you had lost your shoes, but the feeling off wood under your toes was a welcome change from the freezing cold flagstone of the prison floor. It was considerably warmer, despite the freezing chill in the air that came with autumn.

Blearily, you stared around you at your surroundings and were dismayed to see that god awful fountain that had unsettled you so much the first time you saw it. The three elven women with the horrific grimaces.   
It felt like one of them was staring directly at you, screaming out for you, and you managed a wry smile that something so tortured was crying out for you.

Who would tell Winwin?

The wooden platform you were displayed on made you feel as tall as you imagined Winwin felt at all times.

Would he ever fly again?

The rope was secured around your throat.

“STOP!”

*

He was crying. He was slumped down on the floor, fistfuls of white feathers clutched in his hands, balled up and pressed against his chest.   
There was no pain. There was no heaviness, and there was no sadness. Only emptiness.

A gap where his wings should have been.

They were brutal with their technique, restraining him and hacking away at his precious appendages with whatever weapons they had. It was blinding, and it was agonising, but it was over quickly and now he had nothing left that made him who he was.

The heavy wooden door was open, and he stumbled out of it, balancing all of his weight on the wall. He had to drag himself, finding his limbs too sluggish and heavy so he was leaning on the stone and praying that he’d be able to make it before it was too late. 

He liked to listen when he refused to talk, but there was something intensely terrifying about overhearing what would happen as soon as the moon was high in the centre of the sky. 

He was so blind with fear that he couldn’t even think properly.

His feet carried him down the suspiciously empty corridor, wondering where all the usual guards were but too preoccupied to give it much thought. Maybe he was lucky enough to fall out of the room when they were in the middle of switching shifts.

Those thoughts were quickly snuffed by the shouting of a voice he had never heard further down the hallway. His voice was angry, but Sicheng could tell that there was a sheer panic; more emotion in those few shouted words than anything he had heard from the guards assigned to watch him in his room. 

Despite the danger, Sicheng continued his journey down the hallway and towards where all of the shouting was coming from.

Through another room decorated as lavishly as the rest of the palace, Sicheng found the source of all of the shouting and his heart dropped into his stomach.

The man had your eyes.

“Where is she?! Where did you put her?!” the familiar man was shouting, somebody that looked like his subordinate being clutched in his hands and dragged towards him.  
The man was obviously murderously angry, his eyes alight with a fire he had only seen in your own, and Sicheng found himself stumbling towards him with his hand outstretched.  
His shadow was huge and looming from the light coming from the crackling logs in the fire, and it was that which the man saw first, dropping the younger boy in shock and watching as he scurried away like a mouse.

“You…” Sicheng coughed, tripping over nothing and crumpling to his knees. “Her…”   
The man was standing in front of Sicheng, but Sicheng’s eyes were closed. He didn’t want to see this man’s eyes. He couldn’t look at your eyes.

“You’re the one she came here with. Where is she?” The man was crouched down in front of Sicheng when he opened his eyes, and Sicheng found he could only stare at a random point of his face.   
“The other guards. They’ve taken her.”  
“Where?” The soldier laid his hand on Sicheng’s shoulder, shaking him slightly to try and get him to focus.

All Sicheng could hear was the blood rushing past his ears, and all he could see was the molten fear in your eyes in front of him.  
If this how you looked? Is this how you felt? Sicheng was going to be sick. He had eaten recently and it was coming back to haunt him.

“To the square, they said,” Sicheng said, still refusing to meet the man's eyes. “The square with the fountain. Where they got her.”

The man swore, standing up and Sicheng saw that he was only slightly taller than yourself.  
“Why are you telling me this?” the man asked. His breathing was heavy and Sicheng was vaguely aware that he was sitting rather uncomfortably on the floor.

Before he could even respond to him, all he could see was you.

You were smiling at him, submerged in the water up to your knees, and you were bracing yourself on your knees. Sicheng was sat a safe distance from you, his feet also in the cool water and relishing in the rare burst of sun that warmed him to his bones.  
He wasn’t sure what you were smiling at, but instinctively his own cheeks upturned and he was giving you a grin of his own.   
The sound of your laughter was like music to his ears, and he couldn’t help but release his own laughter as he watched you pathetically smack your hands against the water in some vain attempt to splash him with water.   
He stood to his full height, unfurled his wings and unleashed a furious torrent of water that drowned out your screams and then your laughter.

“God’s arse, Winwin! It’ll take me weeks to dry properly!” you shouted, putting your hands out to balance yourself as your feet sank into the muddy bottom of the river and you nearly overbalanced.   
“Come here then,” Winwin said, returning to his spot lounging on the bank. “The sun is nice.”

You sloshed over, flinging yourself onto the grass next to him and rolling onto your back and shielding yourself from the glare of the sun.   
He was staring at you, his heart fluttering pathetically at the way your nose scrunched when the brightness of the sun was too much and you were annoyed. He admired the slope of your nose, ending in a rounded little point, and he loved the way that your lips were downturned into a grimace. Even the smudge of dirt on your cheek with unknown origins was unbearably endearing to him. 

“You’re really beautiful,” he informed you and you snorted.  
“The sun has addled your brain.”  
He didn’t know what addled meant.

He remembered another time when you were humming a song he had never heard. Your voice was sweet, if a little out of tune, but you were merrily making neat incisions into the skin of a rabbit so you could peel the skin from it. Your tongue was poking out of your mouth slightly and Sicheng couldn’t reach out and push it back into your mouth under the watchful gaze of the old man.

He shuffled in place where he was sat and shot a furtive glance at the old man who was reclined against a tree, and Sicheng shot his hand out and slammed his finger straight onto the tip of your tongue that was exposed.  
Your eyes widened and you were spluttering in indignation, tongue retracting behind your teeth and preparing yourself to shout at the angel that more often did things that would be outrageous in polite company. However, at your shocked noises, the old man's eyes flickered towards you and your lips pursed together, eyeing Winwin with anger and a hint of betrayal.   
He could only just about control his expression. You were so cute.

He thought back to the last evening you spent together, and the way that your body looked underneath his. Your chest was heaving and your skin was littered with red marks, evidence that he had been there. His hands were clinging onto your hips, driving himself into you quicker and quicker, tearing the gasps and the moans from your lips until he had to hunch over you, resting his forehead in your neck and kissing the skin on your collarbone. Your hands were carding through his hair, dragging your nails down the flesh of his back and he gasped, the sensation of all of your skin being pressed to his being almost overwhelming. 

“I love her,” Sicheng cried, still clutching the last of his feathers in his tight grip. His hands were sweaty and his heart was beating painfully hard. “I love her.”

Taeyong was staring down at the defeated figure with pity, finding his situation upsetting. He had been out of the city travelling when you and this angel arrived, and he heard of your presence only that morning.   
He should have been overjoyed that he had gotten the chance to see you again, but that you had arrived in somewhere like this made his mouth feel dry and his heart weigh heavily in his chest. You were far too good for a city like this.

Squaring his shoulders at the being on his knees in front of him, he braced a hand on the angel’s shoulder and shook him gently.  
“Then we’ll go and get her, yeah? We’ll go and get Y/N.”   
The angel was nodding with a glazed expression and Taeyong wasn’t sure that he was even seeing him, let alone hearing him. Nevertheless, Taeyong hoisted an arm under the angels and heaved him to his feet.

Taeyong wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but the sheer height of the angel startled him. He was far taller than himself and he was incredibly lean, a kind of physique Taeyong only saw within the guard. The angel could probably throw Taeyong out the window if he was so inclined and Taeyong couldn’t help but feel a little intimidated.  
Trust you to form a relationship with simultaneously the most terrifying and beautiful thing he had ever seen. Typical.

Shaking his head in shock, Taeyong started taking tentative steps towards the exit with the weight of the angel balanced on his shoulder. The angel was trying his best to support his own weight, but he was obviously weak from having his wings cut off.

Sighing heavily, Taeyong wondered what you would think when you saw the bloody stumps of bone and cartilage protruding from your lovers back. You’d probably get angry before anything else and Taeyong could certainly wait to see that. 

“Name’s Taeyong,” he murmured as he gently led the angel down the stairs. The weight of the bigger creature as well as his armour was making him already start to sweat and his hands became slick, struggling to have purchase on the skin of the angel. “Y/N’s older brother.”  
He winced. Did he deserve to call himself that?

“The Knight Captain,” the angel said, and Taeyong’s heart dropped into his stomach.

He had worked harder than anything to alleviate himself to this position in order to provide a good, happy life for you but had pushed you away from him in the process. He wanted to write you letters, to visit you, but chance had taken away the only free opportunities he had and he wasn’t sure if you had learned how to read.   
He thought about you often, though; whenever he heard a woman laugh, or when the flowers bloomed in spring. He saw you in the chrysanthemums the Lady of the city liked best, and he saw you in the way that the forest bowed over in the fierce winds. He felt you in every apple he ate and every time he skinned a rabbit. 

“We need to hurry,” the angel was saying, and he had Taeyong’s full attention again. Something about the angel’s voice, perhaps the timbre, made Taeyong think that the words he spoke were for Taeyong only, and nobody else in the entire world. “They’re going to hurt her.”  
“Hurt her?” Taeyong questioned, but raised the angel slightly higher on his shoulder and quickened his speed. By this time, they’d made it out of the tower and were making their way across the battlements towards the stairs. 

He wasn’t sure if anybody would be walking around the streets at such an early hour in the morning, and he was praying that his position of authority would prevent any questions from being asked. If anybody did have any queries, he’d just have to tell them he was transporting the angels to the prisons outside of the manor grounds due to safety problems.  
That would work on anybody half witted, but he wasn’t sure what he was going to do if he bumped into Godalming. Probably try to take the man’s head clean off.

The first step down to the square was unsteady and tentative, but the angel was keen to keep going even if it meant tipping himself and Taeyong down all of the stone steps. Not willing to be injured in such an avoidable way, Taeyong yanked the angel to a stop and forced him to take it slow, even if the angel was fighting against him every step of the way.

“What did you mean? Who’s going to hurt her?”  
“Those two guards. The ones that always bicker. They wear different colours.”

Taeyong felt his heart stop.

“Fuck!” he exclaimed, yanking on the angel and beginning to walk as fast as he could. If what the angel said was right, then those were Godalming’s men and you were in very imminent danger.   
He had to do something.

The angel pulled himself out of Taeyong’s grip and Taeyong only glanced back momentarily to make sure the angel could keep up before breaking into a sprint, the angel hot on his heels.  
Taeyong could hear him stumbling every now and then but he couldn’t afford to ask if he was okay when your life was in very real danger. 

He wasn’t going to make it. He wasn’t going to make it in time and you would die without him ever telling you how sorry he was that he left you behind. 

“C’mon!” Taeyong murmured angrily, reaching up and unfastening his cuirass. It was only weighing him down at this point and, as he ran through the streets and alleyways, he needed all the speed he could get.   
Next went his gauntlets, followed swiftly by his pauldrons, hitting the floor with a harsh clanging noise that startled a nearby dog into barking and lights to flick on in windows. He paid them no mind, choosing instead to keep at an even pace. He couldn’t find the time to stop and unstrap his greaves, so he chose to clatter through the narrow alleyways and hope that the angel kept up with him.  
His heart was hammering harder than it ever had done before, even throughout all the years of extensive training he had suffered through, and he knew he was going to vomit. The bile was raising in his oesophagus but he still didn’t slow down his run for even a moment. 

The angel behind him was in the same situation as himself, stumbling behind Taeyong and matching his speed despite the blinding pain and the blood loss causing his pulse to throb behind his eyes. 

Through the alleyways and making several sharp turns, the angel couldn’t even take in the sights, tunnel vision making Taeyong the only thing he saw. He had a similar gait; both you and your brother’s left foot turned in ever so slightly. It was such a minor thing, something that only a mother would really notice, but Winwin clung to it as hard as he could. It was like he was running behind you, chasing you through all of the winding alleyways just for fun. Just because you could. Just like the way he chased you through the woods, through the meadows, splashing through brooks and racing each other to the tops of trees and back down.

Winwin was crying.

“STOP!” Taeyong’s voice roared through the town square, and despite himself, Winwin was startled. They had arrived without him even realising it, and the vulgar fountain with the three of his kind made his stomach churn. The same disfigurement that had befallen them had been suffered by himself and the brutality of the humans sickened him. 

There was a male shouting, another one protesting, the grind of wood against wood and a thunking noise, and Winwin was delirious.

He should have listened to you. He should have heeded your warnings and abandoned his mission, telling his brethren that it was too dangerous for their kind to make contact with the humans again.  
It was too dangerous for them, he reminded himself, as he crossed the town square to the wooden platform.

It was too much for him, he chanted in his mind, as he stared up at the way you were displayed with a rope hanging around your neck. It was bad for their kind, he swore to himself, watching you swing lifelessly from the gallows as if you were nothing more than a puppet, a doll hanging from a child’s grasp.

It was bad for his existence, he reminded himself as he launched himself up onto the platform and his fingers delved into the eye sockets of the man closest. He barely registered the blood that burst from the punctured eyeballs, the screams and the shouts, and he didn’t even think anything of the chunks of flesh he gouged from further and further into the head of the man. The body went still, and Winwin was still crying.

A gentle hand lay on his shoulder and he didn’t even have the energy to smack it off and destroy the person it belonged to. They could take him, if they wanted. They could take him and chain him up and torture him for all he knew but they wouldn’t get anything. Sicheng had nothing left to give.

They had stolen his everything.

“S-Sir…” the other man was pleading. Winwin didn’t look. He didn’t care. “P-Please, we, we had orders, we were just-”  
“You killed my sister,” Taeyong was saying, his voice hoarse and emotional. “You killed my baby sister.”   
“Sir, I-I had no idea-”  
“You killed her,” Taeyong was repeating it over and over again as if he was trying to convince himself of the reality. “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you. I’m going to fucking kill you.”  
“No, no, please! I have a family! I have a family, please!”  
“So did she.”

Winwin didn’t listen. He didn’t care. 

It was silent now, and the sun had risen long ago. The usual hustle and bustle of the town square was subdued, hushed, innocent eyes taking in the horrors of the hanged girl, savaged body and the beheaded guard. The angel was sitting incredibly still, hands clasped together and his lips moving in a frantic prayer.  
Taeyong was stood behind him, a silent sentry with both hands clasped firmly over the hilt of his sword that was unsheathed, the tip buried into the wooden floor. 

They would come for him, he knew. He wouldn’t get away with killing one of Godalming’s men, and he would have to leave Greater Dawnstead. He’d’ve left anyway, everything about this accursed place reminding him of the life he had lived without you.

The angel moved only when the guards started to swarm, forming a circle around the gallows with swords drawn and standing ready for the order to attack to come from the man that Taeyong wanted nothing more than to slaughter.

“I’m taking her,” the angel said in a voice so soft Taeyong would have missed it if he was paying attention to anything else. “She is mine, so she will be honoured as one of us.”  
Taeyong’s heart tugged heavily, but he knew this was right. He had no right to arrange a burial for you when he hadn’t been a part of your life for god knows how long. He would have to let you go, just as he did all those years ago when he was barely a man, desperate to prove himself in a world he knew now didn’t care about him.

“Treat her well.” Taeyong said, grasping the angel’s shoulder heavily and squeezing. He knew the power of love, and what it did to people. He saw the way his mother deteriorated after the death of his father and he prayed that the angel wouldn’t meet the same fate.   
He heard of the way you fought with your protectiveness and your silence until the very end, and his heart swelled with admiration for the little girl with stars in her eyes and twigs in her hair.

“Always,” Winwin said, standing up to his full height and taking Taeyong’s sword the cut you down. Your body resting in his arms again made him want to scream out at all of the humans surrounding him. All he was willing to do, all he was willing to show them, was the fire in his eyes and the agony in his soul as he descended the steps with you encompassed tightly in his arms.  
They let him pass. 

He didn’t think much of it. He didn’t think much of anything. 

Nobody said anything as the angel passed through their streets, as silent as death itself, clutching onto his dead lover as if it was the only thing that kept him grounded anymore.

Nobody heard anything from the forests and the mountains in the East again.

**Author's Note:**

> sorry lol. thanks for reading! (:


End file.
